ABSTRACT Smart grids combine cyber systems with complex physical networks and present numerous technological challenges. One example is the implementation of communication technology, specifically within the advanced metering infrastructure, which has made it an attractive target for attackers. Cyber attacks, such as impersonation, unauthorised data access, fraud, energy theft, and reduced network reliability, are some of the threats faced by smart grids. Notably, recent proposals by Mahmood et al., Braeken et al., and Chaudhry et al. aimed at establishing secure communication, claiming their methods fulfil the requisite security criteria. This paper, however, reveals that each of these proposals exhibits security vulnerabilities and lacks sufficient features for deployment. In response to these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel elliptic curve cryptography‐based key establishment scheme, specifically designed to enhance communication security in smart grid cyber‐physical systems. A comprehensive and comparative analysis of the security attributes of the proposed scheme is presented. Furthermore, the security of the scheme is formally validated within the random oracle under the Canetti‐Krawczyk security model. The AVISPA tool is also leveraged to verify the security assertions. The findings demonstrate that the proposed protocol is pioneering in efficiently satisfying the non‐repudiation feature, simultaneously ensuring user anonymity and perfect forward secrecy. It exhibits robustness against various well‐known attacks, including Denial of Service and ephemeral secret leakage attacks, all while effectively managing both computational complexity and communication costs.
Rahdari et al. (2026) studied this question.