Light-weight key distribution and management for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Electricity grids must cope with rising demand and complexity in a changing world. Smart grid is a promising solution to address these challenges. Recently, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is proposed as an integral part of the smart grid that collect and analyze the measurements of energy consumption using the communication network that links the smart meters. The cyber security issues in AMI become very important to guarantee the trustworthiness of the AMI. In order to achieve data confidentiality, privacy and authentication in AMI, security measures using various crypto algorithms will be needed, thus demand key distribution and management schemes. Since the number of electric appliances and devices need to be monitored in households and commercial facilities is large and the devices may have limited computational power and storage, thus novel key distribution and management schemes would be indispensable for the success of securing AMI from cyber attacks. In this work, we propose a light-weight key distribution and management scheme tailored to AMI. Specifically, a group ID based mechanism is proposed to establish the keys for a large amount of entities with small overhead. Security analysis is performed to evaluate the proposed method.