J Supercomput (2013) 64:435–455 DOI 10.1007/s11227-011-0674-5 Secure communication mechanism for ubiquitous Smart grid infrastructure Binod Vaidya · Dimitrios Makrakis · Hussein Mouftah Published online: 15 December 2011 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Smart grid and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) technologies have recently been the focus of rapid advancement and significant investment by many utilities and other service providers. For proper Smart grid deployment, smart energy home area network (HAN) must deploy smart meter along with other utility HAN devices and customer HAN devices. Energy service interface (ESI) is deployed as a HAN gateway which can provide two-way communications between HAN devices and utilities or service providers. However, in order to meet the envisioned func- tional, reliability, and scalability requirements of the Smart grid, cyber security must no longer be neglected. Thus, the development of a comprehensive security mecha- nism for AMI network is predominantly essential. A remote access to HAN devices may be required for either the customer that using his ubiquitous mobile device at the remote site or maintenance personals (either from utilities or service providers) those using handheld devices, which must be done securely. In this paper, we pro- pose a security mechanism for remote access to HAN networks which is comprised of a lightweight and effective ECC-based entity authentication mechanism and ECC- based digital signature scheme. ECC-based entity authentication mechanism allows ESI as a gatekeeper to monitor the authentication process between two communicat- ing entities. With a modified ECC-based digital signature scheme, secure data transfer between mobile devices and HAN devices has occurred. We have conducted security analysis, efficiency analysis as well as formal verification of the proposed mecha- nism. B. Vaidya ( ) · D. Makrakis · H. Mouftah School of Information Technology & Eng, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: bvaidya@site.uottawa.ca D. Makrakis e-mail: dimitris@site.ottawa.ca H. Mouftah e-mail: mouftah@site.ottawa.ca