Identity-based mutual device authentication schemes for PLC system

Power line communication (PLC) is a rapidly evolving technology, aiming to use electrical power lines for the transmission of data. With the expansion scale of PLC, the security issues in PLC system have been focused on as one of the challenging problems. Until now in several well-defined technical specifications, security mechanisms which are symmetric key based system have been defined and implemented; these symmetric key based security mechanism are uncomplicated ways to use in a small scale network. This paper presents public/private key distribution and device authentication schemes that adopt IBC (identity-based cryptography) concept in order to use public key based security scheme in large scale PLC system. By eliminating the needs of public key certificates, proposed scheme can reduce the complexity of deploying and managing authentication credentials.