Paper 2016/009

PUF-BASED SOLUTIONS FOR SECURE COMMUNICATIONS IN ADVANCED METERING INFRASTRUCTURE (AMI)

Mahshid Delavar, Sattar Mirzakuchaki, Mohammad Hassan Ameri, and Javad Mohajeri

Abstract

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) provides two-way communications between the utility and the smart meters. Developing authenticated key exchange (AKE) and broadcast authentication (BA) protocols to provide the security of unicast and broadcast communications in AMI is an essential part of AMI design. The security of all existing cryptographic protocols are based on the assumption that secret information are stored in the non-volatile memory of each party. These information must be kept unknown to the adversary. Unfortunately, in an AMI network, the attackers can obtain some or all of the stored secret information from non-volatile memories by a great variety of inexpensive and fast side channel attacks. Especially, the smart meters which are located in physically insecure environments are more vulnerable to these attacks. Thus, all existing AKE and BA protocols are no longer secure against such attacks. In this paper, we investigate how to develop secure AKE and BA protocols with the presence of memory attack. As a solution, we propose to embed a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) in each communicating party which generate the secret values as required without need to store them. By combining PUFs and two well-known and secure protocols, we propose a PUF-based Authenticated Key Exchange protocol (PUF-AKE) for unicast communications and a PUF-based Broadcast Authentication (PUF-BA) for broadcast communications. We show that our proposed protocols are memory leakage resilient. Also, we prove the security of them in a standard model. Performance analysis of both of the protocols show they are efficient for AMI applications. The proposed protocols can be easily implemented in AMI networks.

Note: The name of 3rd author is missed in the paper.