On the security of 'an ultra-lightweight and secure scheme for communications of smart metres and neighbourhood gateways by utilisation of an ARM Cortex-M microcontroller'

In 2018, Abbasinezhad-Mood and Nikooghadam (IEEE Transaction on Smart Grid, pp 6194-6205, 9(6), 2018) proposed an ultra-lightweight secure scheme for neighbourhood area network (N AN) communications in smart grid. They have claimed that their protocol is secure against all known attacks in N AN environment by providing informal security analysis besides a formal analysis which was done by using an automatic verification tool. However, by performing several attacks, this study shows that their scheme has serious security flaws. After performing each attack, lightweight countermeasures is proposed for securing their protocol against that attack.