Security has become a main concern for the smart grid to move from research and development to industry. The concept of security has usually referred to resistance to threats by an active or passive attacker. However, since smart meters (SMs) are often placed in unprotected areas, physical security has become one of the important security goals in the smart grid. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have been largely utilized for ensuring physical security in recent years, though their reliability has remained a major problem to be practically used in cryptographic applications. Although fuzzy extractors have been considered as a solution to solve the reliability problem of PUFs, they put a considerable computational cost to the resource-constrained SMs. To that end, we first propose an on-chip-error-correcting (OCEC) PUF that efficiently generates stable digits for the authentication process. Afterward, we introduce a lightweight authentication protocol between the SMs and neighborhood gateway (NG) based on the proposed PUF. The provable security analysis shows that not only the proposed protocol can stand secure in the Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) adversary model but also provides additional security features. Also, the performance evaluation demonstrates the significant improvement of the proposed scheme in comparison with the state-of-the-art.

翻译：安全性已成为智能电网从研发阶段迈向产业化过程中的核心关切。传统安全概念通常指抵御主动或被动攻击者的威胁。然而，由于智能电表常部署于非受保护区域，物理安全性已成为智能电网的重要安全目标之一。近年来，物理不可克隆函数（PUF）被广泛用于保障物理安全，但其可靠性问题仍是实际应用于密码学领域的主要障碍。尽管模糊提取器被视为解决PUF可靠性问题的方案，但对于资源受限的智能电表而言，其计算开销显著。为此，本文首先提出一种片上纠错型物理不可克隆函数（OCEC PUF），能够高效生成认证所需的稳定比特序列。继而，我们基于所提出的PUF，在智能电表与邻域网关之间构建轻量级认证协议。可证明安全性分析表明，该协议不仅能在Canetti-Krawczyk（CK）敌手模型下保持安全，还具备额外安全特性。性能评估结果也证实，与现有先进方案相比，本方案具有显著优势。