Abstract
The rapid advancements in smart grid (SG) technology extend a large number of applications including vehicle charging, smart buildings, and smart cities through the efficient use of advanced communication architecture. However, the underlying public channel leads these services to be vulnerable to many threats. Recently, some security schemes were proposed to counter these threats. However, the insecurities of some of these schemes against key compromise impersonation (KCI) and related attacks or compromise on efficiency calls for a secure and efficient authentication scheme for SG infrastructure. A new scheme to secure SG communication is presented in this article to provide a direct device-to-device authentication among smart meter and neighborhood area network gateway. Designed specifically to resists KCI and related attacks, the proposed scheme is more secure and completes the authentication procedure by using the least communication cost as compared with related schemes, which is evident through security and efficiency comparisons.