EATH: An efficient aggregate authentication protocol for smart grid communications

The increasing demands for improving transmission reliability and efficiency have brought us a wide interest in smart grid. In current smart grid research, one of challenges is its security issue. If the security is not well addressed, the concept of smart grid cannot be widely accepted. In this paper, in order to simultaneously resolve the security and efficiency challenges in smart grid communications, we propose an efficient aggregate authentication protocol, called EATH, which is characterized by eliminating the Map-To-Hash hash and reducing the pairing operations in aggregation and verification to improve the computational efficiency. Detailed security analysis has shown that the proposed EATH protocol is secure in terms of source authentication and data integrity in smart grid communications. In addition, performance evaluation also demonstrates its efficiency in terms of low computation and communication overheads.