An efficient authentication and key agreement scheme for secure smart grid communication services.

Summary: The smart grid is a new and promising technology integrating new information and communication technologies to improve the distribution and consumption of electricity between energy suppliers and their end customers. However, this advanced solution is facing a serious security problem as regards the interception and falsification of power consumption data, hence generating falsified electricity consumption bills. This issue of security needs to be promptly and efficiently handled. Clearly, it is of paramount importance to have a security mechanism to avoid such losses. Our work focuses on this issue. It particularly concerns the development of a security mechanism to ensure a completely secure communication between energy suppliers and their consumers while preserving the privacy of end customers in terms of protection of their personal information including their identities. The experimental results underscore that our solution outperforms those of the literature in terms of computation cost and robustness against various types of attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]