Provably Secure And Efficient Puf-Based Broadcast Authentication Schemes For Smart Grid Applications

Many smart grid applications need broadcast communications. Because of the critical role of the broadcasted messages in these applications, their authentication is very important to prevent message forgery attacks. Smart grid consists of plenty of low-resource devices such as smart meters or phasor measurement units (PMUs) that are located in physically unprotected environments. Therefore, the storage and computational constraints of these devices as well as their security against physical attacks must be considered in designing broadcast authentication schemes. In this paper, we consider two communication models based on the resources of the broadcasters and receivers and propose a physical unclonable function (PUF)-based broadcast authentication scheme for each of them including Broadcast Authentication with High-Resource Broadcaster (BA-HRB) and Broadcast Authentication with Low-Resource Broadcaster (BA-LRB). We formally prove that both schemes are unforgeable and memory leakage resilient. Moreover, we analyze the performance of our proposed schemes and compare them with related works. The comparison results demonstrate a significant improvement in the storage and computational overhead of our schemes compared with the related works.