A Lightweight Anonymous Device Authentication Scheme for Information-Centric Distribution Feeder Microgrid

Distribution feeder microgrid (DFM) built based on existing distributed feeder (DF), is a promising solution for modern microgrid. DFM contains a large number of heterogeneous devices that generate heavy network traffice and require a low data delivery latency. The information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm has shown a great potential to address the communication requirements of smart grid. However, the integration of advanced information and communication technologies with DFM make it vulnerable to cyber attacks. Adequate authentication of grid devices is essential for preventing unauthorized accesses to the grid network and defending against cyber attacks. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight anonymous device authentication scheme for DFM supported by named data networking (NDN), a representative implementation of ICN. We perform a security analysis to show that the proposed scheme can provide security features such as mutual authentication, session key agreement, defending against various cyber attacks, anonymity, and resilience against device capture attack. The security of the proposed scheme is also formally verified using the popular AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. The computational and communication costs of the proposed scheme are evaluated. Our results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significantly lower computational, communication and energy costs than other state-of-the-art schemes.