A Secure Lightweight Hardware-Assisted Charging Coordination Authentication Framework for Trusted Smart Grid Energy Storage Units

Smart plug-in electrical vehicles (PEVs) have recently become essential components of the energy storage units (ESUs) in a smart power grid network. ESUs need to frequently communicate with charging stations for authentication before their battery systems are securely and efficiently charged. In this paper, an efficient lightweight hardware-assisted authentication and key management framework for ESU based charging coordination system is proposed. The framework integrates a hybrid lightweight arbiter linear feedback shift register (ALFSR) physical unclonable function and a low-cost advanced encryption standard (AES) for more secure, trusted, and robust secret key scheme. The scheme is implemented and validated on a reprogrammable device using 28 nm Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) platform. The results demonstrate that our framework can generate inherently unique and reliable secret keys. The proposed scheme is efficient in terms of key storage requirements and satisfies the authentication time of five security levels required by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Furthermore, the resilience of the proposed ALFSR is analyzed against ML modeling attacks, including k-nearest neighbor (kNN), kernel support vector machines (KernelSVM), and artificial neural network (ANN) which aim to clone the PUF behavior and compromise the secret key. The preliminary results demonstrate that the ALFSR PUF design is less vulnerable to kNN and SVM ML attacks as compared to ANN attacks.