LCL-AKA: Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Power IoT
Zewei Liu, Chunqiang Hu, Conghao Ruan, Yuwen Pu, Pengfei Hu, Jiguo Yu · IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid · 2025
The rapid adoption of power Internet of Things (PIoT) systems has made security a critical concern, particularly as existing certificateless authentication and key agreement (CL-AKA) protocols face three fundamental limitations that hinder their practical deployment: excessive computational overhead from multi-round interactions, inadequate protection against advanced cryptanalytic attacks, and inflexible architectures unsuitable for dynamic grid environments. To tackle the previously mentioned challenges, this paper proposes lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol (LCL-AKA) for PIoT. Firstly, this protocol efficiently completes the process of identity authentication and session key agreement within a single round of communication interaction, significantly reducing computational costs and improving communication efficiency. Security is rigorously validated through formal proofs under the eCK model and comprehensive analysis showing resistance to key compromise impersonation, unknown key-share attack. Ultimately, comparative experiments are executed to delve into the security and performance characteristics of the proposed protocol. Compared to benchmark protocols deployed in PIoT, the authentication delay of LCL-AKA is decreased by at least 14.88%; in addition, the energy consumption of LCL-AKA is decreased by at least 11.28%.