LAUSR

In smart grid, key exchange protocols play a vital role in providing secure channels to read consumption reports from the smart meters. Thus far, several key exchange schemes have been proposed for the networked smart meters. However, for the first time, quite recently, Sha et al. have presented an interesting two-phase authentication and key agreement scheme that exclusively aims at the isolated smart meters. In their scheme, they have properly addressed the computationally constrained smart meters by offering a lightweight key exchange protocol. Nevertheless, after meticulous observation, we found that their proposed scheme cannot resist the desynchronization attack and cannot provide the perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, there are some other weaknesses in their scheme. As a result, to tackle the existing security challenges, in this paper, by utilization of the extended Chebyshev chaotic maps, we propose an efficient anonymous password-authenticated key exchange protocol that not only is free from the limitations of Sha et al.'s scheme, but also provides the anonymity. The security analysis in the random oracle model and using the widely accepted ProVerif tool besides the computational and communication costs comparison demonstrate that the proposed scheme has reached a proper level of efficiency without sacrificing the desired security properties.