Received: 17 February 2018 Revised: 7 April 2018 Accepted: 2 May 2018 Published on: 12 August 2018 DOI: 10.1002/spy2.34 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Design and microcontroller-based hardware performance analysis of a security-enhanced lightweight communication scheme for smart grid Dariush Abbasinezhad-Mood Morteza Nikooghadam Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Imam Reza International University, Mashhad, Iran Correspondence Morteza Nikooghadam, Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Imam Reza International University, Mashhad, Iran. Email: m.nikooghadam@imamreza.ac.ir In smart grid, usage reports of consumers are collected via the smart meters (SMs) and sent to the power management and control center. In addition, some instructions are sent from the control center to the SMs. These two-way communications between customers and energy suppliers are subject to numerous security threats. Due to the limited processing capability and storage space of the SMs, it is required to employ lightweight communication schemes. To do so, quite recently, Liu et al have pro- posed an interesting lightweight authenticated communication scheme for the secure bidirectional communications of SMs and neighborhood gateways in smart grid. In this paper, we first demonstrate that their scheme suffers from the SM’s memory modification attack and pollution attack, then, we propose an enhanced lightweight communication scheme that is secure against the mentioned attacks. The compar- ative performance analysis with recent works in this field shows that our scheme not only is more efficient in terms of computational complexity and communica- tion cost, but also benefits from substantial reduction in the required storage space. Our realistic hardware implementation on two popular microcontrollers confirms this claim. KEYWORDS ARM Cortex-M3, ATmega2560, bidirectional communications, lightweight, smart grid, SM security 1 INTRODUCTION The conventional power grid cannot meet the actual requirements of modern societies and the information age. 1,2 As a result, the adoption of smart grid technologies becomes a vital necessity for the next generation. Smart grid is based on its conventional ancestor 2 and it integrates advanced sensing technologies and control methods into the current electricity grid. Gharavi and Ghafurian 3 defined smart grid as “an electric system that uses information, two-way, cyber-secure communication technologies, and computational intelligence in an integrated fashion across electricity generation, transmission, substations, distribution and consumption to achieve a system that is clean, safe, secure, reliable, resilient, efficient, and sustainable.” In smart grid, the SMs collect the energy consumption of users and send them to the power management and control center through some inter- mediate gateways. It is worth noting that the communications of the SMs and control center are bidirectional. That is to say, the control center or gateways can also respond or send required commands to the SMs. This bidirectional flow of signals is the main contribution of smart grid. 2 Due to the many advantages that smart grid brings us, such as pervasive control, self-healing, remote check, and more customer choices, 4–8 many countries intend to implement the modern smart grid technology to not only benefit from its many features, but also to reduce nontechnical losses and greenhouse gas emissions by cutting down the Security Privacy. 2018;1:e34. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/spy2 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 of 16 https://doi.org/10.1002/spy2.34