International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 01 August 2025

Dariush Abbasinezhad-Mood
ePrint Report ePrint Report
In smart grid (SG), key agreement protocols (KAPs) are used as one of the most prevalent means to establish secure data transmission channels between smart meters (SMs) and service providers (SPs). Quite recently, Wu et al. have indicated the vulnerability of Hu et al.'s KAP to key compromise impersonation (KCI) attack and proposed a security-enhanced one for secure communications of SMs and SPs in SG. Not to undermine the noteworthy contributions of their work, this comment demonstrates that their own KAP, i.e., Wu et al.'s scheme is still vulnerable to KCI attack. Accordingly, we suggest a simple modification to fix the KCI attack issue. Our attack procedure gives some delicate hints to scholars to protect their schemes against the KCI attack in future researches.
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