Explore the vast range of titles available.

Smart grids integrate information and communications technology into the processes of electricity production, transportation, and consumption, thereby enabling interactions between power suppliers and consumers to increase the efficiency of the power grid. To achieve this, smart meters (SMs) are installed in households or buildings to measure electricity usage and allow power suppliers or consumers to monitor and manage it in real time. However, SMs require a secure service to address malicious attacks during memory protection and communication processes and a lightweight communication protocol suitable for devices with computational and communication constraints. This paper proposes an authentication protocol based on a one-way hash function to address these issues. This protocol includes message authentication functions to address message tampering and uses a changing encryption key for secure communication during each transmission. The security and performance analysis of this protocol shows that it can address existing attacks and provides 105,281.67% better computational efficiency than previous methods.

With the development in wireless communication and low-power device, users can receive various useful services such as electric vehicle (EV) charging, smart building, and smart home services at anytime and anywhere in smart grid (SG) environments. The SG devices send demand of electricity to the remote control center and utility center (UC) to use energy services, and UCs handle it for distributing electricity efficiently. However, in SG environments, the transmitted messages are vulnerable to various attacks because information related to electricity is transmitted over an insecure channel. Thus, secure authentication and key agreement are essential to provide secure energy services for legitimate users. In 2019, Kumar et al. presented a secure authentication protocol for demand response management in the SG system. However, we demonstrate that their protocol is insecure against masquerade, the SG device stolen, and session key disclosure attacks and does not ensure secure mutual authentication. Thus, we propose a privacy-preserving lightweight authentication protocol for demand response management in the SG environments to address the security shortcomings of Kumar et al.’s protocol. The proposed protocol withstands various attacks and ensures secure mutual authentication and anonymity. We also evaluated the security features of the proposed scheme using informal security analysis and proved the session key security of proposed scheme using the ROR model. Furthermore, we showed that the proposed protocol achieves secure mutual authentication between the SG devices and the UC using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic analysis. We also demonstrated that our authentication protocol prevents man-in-the-middle and replay attacks utilizing AVISPA simulation tool and compared the performance analysis with other existing protocols. Therefore, the proposed scheme provides superior safety and efficiency other than existing related protocols and can be suitable for practical SG environments.

The increasing integration of photovoltaic (PV) systems into smart grids introduces new cybersecurity vulnerabilities, particularly against cyber-physical attacks that can manipulate grid operations and disrupt renewable energy generation. This paper proposes a multi-layered cyber-resilient PV optimization framework, leveraging digital twin-based deception, reinforcement learning-driven cyber defense, and blockchain authentication to enhance grid security and operational efficiency. A deceptive cyber-defense mechanism is developed using digital twin technology to mislead adversaries, dynamically generating synthetic PV operational data to divert attack focus away from real assets. A deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based defense model optimizes adaptive attack mitigation strategies, ensuring real-time response to evolving cyber threats. Blockchain authentication is incorporated to prevent unauthorized data manipulation and secure system integrity. The proposed framework is modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem, balancing attack diversion efficiency, system resilience, computational overhead, and energy dispatch efficiency. A non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-III) is employed to achieve Pareto-optimal solutions, ensuring high system resilience while minimizing computational burdens. Extensive case studies on a realistic PV-integrated smart grid test system demonstrate that the framework achieves an attack diversion efficiency of up to 94.2%, improves cyberattack detection rates to 98.5%, and maintains an energy dispatch efficiency above 96.2%, even under coordinated cyber threats. Furthermore, computational overhead is analyzed to ensure that security interventions do not impose excessive delays on grid operation. The results validate that digital twin-based deception, reinforcement learning, and blockchain authentication can significantly enhance cyber-resilience in PV-integrated smart grids. This research provides a scalable and adaptive cybersecurity framework that can be applied to future renewable energy systems, ensuring grid security, operational stability, and sustainable energy management under adversarial conditions.

In the last few years, technological advancement has led to the use of wearable body sensors for gathering patient information. Wireless body area networks played an essential role in the modern medical era. Through wearable body sensors, patient data are sent to medical professionals in real-time without any hindrance. This information moves through the public channel, and thus proper security and protection are needed because of its sensitiveness. Many authentication protocols proposed for solving these issues were neither secure nor cost-effective. This paper proposed an authentication protocol using certificateless cryptography for wireless body area networks to resolve the associated security concerns. A formal security analysis is done using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic shows that the proposed protocol is resilient against prevailing attacks. Additionally, we employ the Real-or-Random model for mathematical proof and Automated Verification Security Protocol and Analysis simulation tool for security analysis. A detailed comprehensive comparison with the existing protocols indicates that the proposed protocol is cost-effective with improved functionality.

As an important component of the smart grid, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks can deliver diverse auxiliary services and enhance the overall resilience of electrical power systems. However, V2G networks face two main challenges due to a large number of devices that connect to it. First, V2G networks suffer from serious security threats, such as doubtful authenticity and privacy leakage. Second, the efficiency will decrease significantly due to the massive requirements of authentication. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes a cross-domain authentication scheme for V2G networks based on consortium blockchain and certificateless signature technology. Featuring decentralized, open, and transparent transactions that cannot be tampered with, this scheme achieves good performance on both security and efficiency, which proves to be suitable for V2G scenarios in the smart grid.

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has become a promising concept for the near future smart grid eco-system. V2G improves smart grid resiliency by enabling two-way communication and electricity flows while reducing the greenhouse gases emission. V2G practicality and stability is strongly based on the exchanged data between electrical vehicles (EVs) and the grid server (GS). However, using communication protocols to exchange vital information leads grid to being vulnerable against various types of attack. To prevent the well-known attacks in V2G network, this paper proposes a privacy-aware authentication scheme that ensures data integrity, confidentiality, users’ identity and location privacy, mutual authentication, and physical security based on physical unclonable function (PUF). Furthermore, the performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art, since EVs only use lightweight cryptographic primitives for every protocol execution.

The study introduces the novel message authentication schemes for the smart meter system, where the symmetric cryptography-based physical layer-assisted message authentication (PLAA) scheme and the public key infrastructure- based PLAA scheme are introduced. The proposed schemes integrate the conventional message authentication schemes and the physical layer authentication mechanisms by taking advantage of temporal and spatial uniqueness in physical layer channel responses, aiming to achieve fast authentication while minimising the packet transmission overhead. The authors also verify their claims through extensive analysis and simulation via comparing with proposed PLAA scheme with traditional upper layer authentication schemes. The proposed novel schemes yield the lower time delay for authenticating each message, which can satisfy the requirement of the real-time control over the smart grid.

With the rapid evolution of smart grids, secure and efficient data communication among hierarchical sensor devices has become critical to ensure privacy and system integrity. However, existing protocols often fail to balance security strength and resource constraints of terminal sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel identity-based secure data communication protocol tailored for hierarchical sensor groups in smart grid environments. The protocol integrates symmetric and asymmetric encryption to enable secure and efficient data sharing. To reduce computational overhead, a Bloom filter is employed for lightweight identity encoding, and a cloud-assisted pre-authentication mechanism is introduced to enhance access efficiency. Furthermore, we design a dynamic group key update scheme with minimal operations to maintain forward and backward security in evolving sensor networks. Security analysis proves that the protocol is resistant to replay and impersonation attacks, while experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in computational and communication efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods—achieving reductions of 73.94% in authentication computation cost, 37.77% in encryption, and 55.75% in decryption, along with a 79.98% decrease in communication overhead during authentication.

In recent times, the research works on the integration of fog computing with blockchain to address the issues such as higher latency, single point of failure, and centralization have expanded considerably. However, only a few works have been done focusing on authentication and key establishment for blockchain-based smart grid (SG) under fog environment. Thus, this paper introduces a mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for blockchain and fog computing based SG environment. Unlike the existing schemes that depend on single trusted authorities for storage and computation tasks, the proposed scheme reduces this dependency by creating a blockchain-based distributed environment assisted by cloud servers and fog nodes. In addition, a secure and shared key is established among smart meter, fog node, and cloud server to achieve message confidentiality between them. A detailed formal and informal security analysis proves that the proposed protocol is secure under the RoR model and achieves the predefined security goals. The blockchain and cryptographic operations are evaluated using hyperledger fabric and cryptographic libraries, respectively. Finally, the performance analysis and comparative study show that the proposed scheme with some additional features is efficient in computational and communication costs.

A secure system is proposed in order to authenticate smart meter reading for securing the overall smart grid communication. Compression based techniques are employed to prevent power reading by unauthenticated entities. Impersonation attacks are common in smart grid environment which cause drastic security issues along with economic issues. Compression along with authentication is studied here to weed out the potential threats raised by unauthenticated access. Hypothesis based testing analysis is done to differentiate intruder based signal and genuine signal. This could be applied to meter data more effectively and is thought to bring about low authentication issues concerned with smart meter data. So the increased threat level in smart meter communications in grid can be lowered efficiently by using compression and authentication and make the overall system secure.