A Novel Certificateless Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Grid.

With the rapid development of the smart grid (SG), the security and reliability of communication for SG has become an urgent and critical issue. The authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol has emerged as important means to address the security challenges in smart grid. This paper proposes a novel certificateless authentication and key agreement protocol (NCL-AKA) for the smart grid, which overcomes the limitations of existing AKA protocol such as complex certificate management, untimely certificate revocation, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Firstly, the system architecture and threat model of the proposed protocol is presented. Then, the correctness and security of the proposed protocol are analyzed. Finally, comparative experiments and analysis reveal that the NCL-AKA has lower computational cost and communication overhead.