Novel Anonymous Key Establishment Protocol for Isolated Smart Meters

In a smart grid, fine-grained usage reports of consumers are gathered using some computationally constrained smart measurement devices. One of the most challenging requirements in the data aggregation is how to securely read the consumption data, while putting the least possible overhead on smart meters. For this reason, recently, two efficient security protocols have been proposed to be used for subsequent secure consumption reports gathered from isolated smart measurement devices. Nonetheless, in both protocols, for each key establishment, the smart reader requires to connect to the electricity service provider (ESP) via the Internet. This paper proposes a novel key establishment protocol, which is free from the ESP involvement during the key agreement and benefits from notable reduction in the communication cost. Our thorough efficiency and security analyses indicate the eminence of the proposed security protocol.