Design, Analysis and Evaluation of a Lightweight Symmetric Key Stream Generator for Smart Meter and Autonomous Vehicle Security

The security of the smart grid and autonomous vehicles is the cause for concern as they function with the aid of heterogeneous networks formed by information & communication technologies. These technologies employ different standards and protocols to operate, resulting in security issues. The issue of security can be mitigated by applying cryptographic solutions. The basic requirements of security solutions must be lightweight in terms of hardware complexity, cost, least computation time, memory, and other resources. This paper proposes a symmetric key stream generator that satisfies the requirements of being a lightweight solution. An experimental setup developed around a popular Arduino nano-platform was used to implement the proposed symmetric key generator. Also, a statistical test suite was developed to conduct statistical tests on the output bit stream of the proposed symmetric key generator. The proposed symmetric key generator and its output bit stream were subjected to mathematical, experimental, statistical, security, and comparative analysis to validate its suitability for smart grid and autonomous vehicle security. The results have proved that the proposed symmetric-key generator is indeed suitable for smart grid and autonomous vehicle security.