Novel Soft-BD-PUF-Based Zero-Knowledge Authentication Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is a modern technique that revolutionizes how energy is distributed and consumed. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) plays a crucial role in enabling renewable energy trading. It provides both physical and virtual channels for exchanging electricity and information between peers. Thus far, several authentication protocols (APs) have been suggested to secure information exchange in the AMI. However, most of them are just anonymous from the view of external adversaries making them improper for P2P energy trading systems. Therefore, to fully address critical privacy concerns in the AMI, this paper proposes a novel AP that presents the following distinct contributions. First and the foremost, our suggested AP provides “conditional unlinkability” of consumer smart meters (SMs) and “conditional anonymity” of producer SMs during the session key agreement. More specifically, by employing an innovative zero-knowledge authentication approach, producer SMs would not require any certificate for authenticating consumer SMs. Second, to add the unclonability property to SMs, the suggested AP uses physical unclonable function (PUF) and to alleviate noise consequences on PUF, it uses enhanced “soft-BD-PUF.” Third, since in P2P energy trading both parties are resource-limited, we have tried to diminish the overhead of AP and provided a computational balance between SMs. Last but not least, our AP can offer desired security properties like perfect forward secrecy and unlike blockchain-based APs can resist distributed denial of service attacks. Security and efficiency improvements of our suggested AP have been both supported by comparative performance and property analyses.