| Summary: | The incorporation of information and communication technologies in the power grids has greatly enhanced efficiency in the management of demand-responses. In addition, smart grids have seen considerable minimization in energy consumption and enhancement in power supply quality. However, the transmission of control and consumption information over open public communication channels renders the transmitted messages vulnerable to numerous security and privacy violations. Although many authentication and key agreement protocols have been developed to counter these issues, the achievement of ideal security and privacy levels at optimal performance still remains an uphill task. In this paper, we leverage on Hamming distance, elliptic curve cryptography, smart cards and biometrics to develop an authentication protocol. It is formally analyzed using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, which shows strong mutual authentication and session key negotiation. Its semantic security analysis demonstrates its robustness under all the assumptions of the Dolev-Yao (DY) and Canetti- Krawczyk (CK) threat models. From the performance perspective, it is shown to incur communication, storage and computation complexities compared with other related state of the art protocols.
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