Salsa20 based lightweight security scheme for smart meter communication in smart grid

The traditional power gird is altering dramatically to a smart power grid with the escalating development of information and communication technology (ICT). Among thousands of electronic devices connected to the grid through communication network, smart meter (SM) is the core networking device. The consolidation of ICT to the electronic devices centered on SM open loophole for the adversaries to launch cyber-attack. Therefore, for protecting the network from the adversaries it is required to design lightweight security mechanism for SM, as conventional cryptography schemes poses extensive computational cost, processing delay and overhead which is not suitable to be used in SM. In this paper, we have proposed a security mechanism consolidating elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Salsa20 stream cipher algorithm to ensure security of the network as well as addressing the problem of energy efficiency and lightweight security solution. We have numerically analyzed the performance of our proposed scheme in case of energy efficiency and processing time which reveals that the suggested mechanism is suitable to be used in SM as it consumes less power and requires less processing time to encrypt or decrypt.