Abstract-Navigating security and privacy challenges is one of the crucial requirements in the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) network. Since Electric Vehicles (EV) need to provide their private information to aggregators/servers when charging/discharging at different charging stations, privacy of the vehicle owners can be compromised if the information is misused, traced, or revealed. In a wide V2G network, where vehicles can move outside of their home network to visiting networks, security and privacy becomes even more challenging due to untrusted entities in the visiting networks. Although some privacy-preserving solutions were proposed in literature to tackle this problem, they do not protect against well-known security attacks and generate a huge overhead. Therefore, we propose a mutual authentication scheme to preserve privacy of the EV's information from aggregators/servers in the home as well as distributed visiting V2G networks. Our scheme, based on a bilinear pairing technique with an accumulator performing batch verification, yields higher system efficiency, defeats various security attacks, and maintains untraceability, forward privacy, and identity anonymity. Performance analysis shows that our scheme, in comparison with existing solutions, generates significantly lower communication and computation overheads in the home and centralized V2G networks, and comparable overheads in the distributed visiting V2G networks.

Abstract-The smart grid, as the next generation of the power grid, is characterized by employing many different types of intelligent devices, such as intelligent electronic devices located at substations, smart meters positioned in the home area network, and outdoor field equipment deployed in the fields. Also, there are various users in the smart grid network, including customers, operators, maintenance personnel, and etc., who use these devices for various purposes. Therefore, a secure and efficient mutual authentication and authorization scheme is needed in the smart grid to prevent various insider and outsider attacks on many different devices. In this paper, we propose an authentication and authorization scheme for mitigating outsider and insider threats in the smart grid by verifying the user authorization and performing the user authentication together whenever a user accesses the devices. The proposed scheme computes each user-role dynamically using an attribute-based access control and verifies the identity of user together with the device. Security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme resists various insider as well as outsider attacks, and is more efficient in terms of communication and computation costs in comparison with the existing schemes. The correctness of the proposed scheme is also proved using BAN-Logic and Proverif.

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The Evolved Packet System-based Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS-AKA) protocol of the long-term evolution (LTE) network does not support Internet of Things (IoT) objects and has several security limitations, including transmission of the object’s (user/device) identity and key set identifier in plaintext over the network, synchronization, large overhead, limited identity privacy, and security attack vulnerabilities. In this article, we propose a new secure and efficient AKA protocol for the LTE network that supports secure and efficient communications among various IoT devices as well as among the users. Analysis shows that our protocol is secure, efficient, and privacy preserved, and reduces bandwidth consumption during authentication.

Nowadays, Short Message Service is being used in many daily life applications including healthcare monitoring, mobile banking, mobile commerce etc. But when we send an SMS from one mobile phone to another, the information contained in the SMS transmit as plain text. Sometimes this information may be confidential like account numbers, passwords, license numbers etc., and it is a major drawback to send such information through SMS while the traditional SMS service does not provide encryption to the information before its transmission. In this paper, we proposed an efficient and secure protocol called EasySMS which provides end-to-end secure communication through SMS between end users. The working of the protocol is presented by considering two different scenarios. The analysis of the proposed protocol shows that this protocol is able to prevent various attacks including SMS disclosure, over the air modification, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, and impersonation attack. The EasySMS protocol generates minimum communication and computation overheads as compare to existing SMSSec and PK-SIM protocols. On an average, the EasySMS protocol reduces 51% and 31% of the bandwidth consumption and reduces 62% and 45% of message exchanged during the authentication process as compare to SMSSec and PK-SIM protocols respectively. Authors claim that EasySMS is the first protocol completely based on the symmetric key cryptography and retain original architecture of cellular network.

Abstract:The smart grid (SG) is a promising platform for providing more reliable, efficient, and cost effective electricity to the consumers in a secure manner. Numerous initiatives across the globe are taken by both industry and academia in order to compile various security issues in the smart grid network. Unfortunately, there is no impactful survey paper available in the literature on authentications in the smart grid network. Therefore, this paper addresses the required objectives of an authentication protocol in the smart grid network along with the focus on mutual authentication, access control, and secure integration among different SG components. We review the existing authentication protocols, and analyze mutual authentication, privacy, trust, integrity, and confidentiality of communicating information in the smart grid network. We review authentications between the communicated entities in the smart grid, such as smart appliance, smart meter, energy provider, control center (CC), and home/building/neighborhood area network gateways (GW). We also review the existing authentication schemes for the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communication network along with various available secure integration and access control schemes. We also discuss the importance of the mutual authentication among SG entities while providing confidentiality and privacy preservation, seamless integration, and required access control with lower overhead, cost, and delay. This paper will help to provide a better understanding of current authentication, authorization, and secure integration issues in the smart grid network and directions to create interest among researchers to further explore these promising areas. OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2015, 8 11884

Abstract-In the smart grid, an integrated distributed authentication protocol is needed to not only securely manage the system but also efficiently authenticate many different entities for the communications. In addition, a lightweight authentication protocol is required to handle frequent authentications among billions of devices. Unfortunately, in the literature, there is no such integrated protocol that provides mutual authentication among the home environment, energy provider, gateways, and advanced metering infrastructure network. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a lightweight cloud-trusted authorities-based integrated (centrally controlled) distributed authentication protocol that provides mutual authentications among communicated entities in a distributed manner. Based on certificateless cryptosystem, our protocol is lightweight and efficient even when there are invalid requests in a batch. Security and performance analysis show that the protocol provides privacy preservation, forward secrecy, semantic security, perfect key ambiguous, and protection against identity thefts while generating lower overheads in comparison with the existing protocols. Also, the protocol is secure against man-in-the-middle attacks, redirection attacks, impersonation attacks, and denial-of-service attacks. Moreover, our protocol provides a complete resistance against flood-based denial-of-service attacks.