Anonymous Key Agreement and Mutual Authentication Protocol for Smart Grids Vincent Omollo Nyangaresi 1(&) , Zaid Ameen Abduljabbar 2,3 , Salah H. Abbdal Refish 4 , Mustafa A. Al Sibahee 5,6 , Enas Wahab Abood 7 , and Songfeng Lu 8,9 1 Faculty of Biological and Physical Sciences, Tom Mboya University College, Homabay, Kenya vnyangaresi@tmuc.ac.ke 2 Department of Computer Science, College of Education for Pure Sciences, University of Basrah, Basrah, Iraq zaid.ameen@uobasrah.edu.iq 3 Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen Institute, Shenzhen, China 4 Computer Techniques Engineering Department, Faculty of Information Technology, Imam Ja’afar Al-Sadiq University, Baghdad, Iraq salah.hassan@sadiq.edu.iq 5 College of Big Data and Internet, Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen 518118, China mustafa@sztu.edu.cn 6 Computer Technology Engineering Department, Iraq University College, Basrah, Iraq 7 Department of Mathematics, College of Science, University of Basrah, Basrah, Iraq enas.abood@uobasrah.edu.iq 8 Hubei Engineering Research Center on Big Data Security, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China lusongfeng@hust.edu.cn 9 Shenzhen Institute of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China Abstract. The security and privacy protection of smart grid data exchanged over the open and public wireless communication channels is critical yet chal- lenging in this environment. Conventionally, public key cryptography, group signatures, blind signatures, identity based schemes and elliptic curve cryp- tography could provide the much needed security and privacy. However, all these techniques either lack some smart grid security requirements or have intensive communication, storage and computation overheads. This obviously renders them inef ficient for resource-constrained smart grid network devices. In this paper, an anonymous key agreement and authentication protocol to address some of these challenges is proposed. The simulation results showed that the proposed protocol is the most ef ficient in terms of bandwidth and computation requirements. It also required relatively less memory space during its entire execution than some of the related protocols. Further, it is demonstrated that it © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2022 Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All Rights Reserved H. Jin et al. (Eds.): CROWNCOM 2021/WiCON 2021, LNICST 427, pp. 325–340, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98002-3_24