A Lightweight PUF-Based Group Authentication Scheme for Privacy-Preserving Metering Data Collection in Smart Grid

With the development of information and communication technologies, the services provided by smart grid attract more users to join smart grid. However, with the explosive growth of the number of smart meters, the transmission between the control center and smart meters has brought huge data transmission and computing costs to the smart grid, which is prone to network congestion, untimely power service supply and other network conditions. This paper proposes a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF)-based lightweight group authenticated metering data collection scheme with privacy protection in smart grid (PGAC). The PGAC scheme is designed with lightweight cryptographic primitives, which is suitable for resource-constrained devices. In addition, the PGAC scheme divides the users into groups and uses the gateway as the repeater and aggregator of the communication data of each group, which reduces signaling and communication costs for activating additional request messages from a large number of devices. Security analysis shows that the PGAC scheme maintains the security and privacy of the data collection process for large-scale smart meters. Functional analysis, theoretical analysis and performance analysis show that PGAC scheme has better authentication function and low communication cost.