eSKAMI: Efficient and Scalable Multi-group Key Management for Advanced Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grid

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is composed of systems and networks for measuring, collecting, storing, analyzing, and exploiting energy usage related data. AMI is an enabling technology for Smart Grid (SG) and hence represents a privileged target for security attacks with potentially great damage against infrastructures and privacy. For this reason, security has been identified as one of the most challenging topics in AMI development, and designing an efficient Key Management Scheme (KMS) is one of first important steps. In this paper, we propose a new scalable and efficient key management scheme that we call Efficient and Scalable multi-group Key Management for AMI (eSKAMI) to secure data communications in an Advanced Metering Infrastructure. It is a key management scheme that can support unicast, multicast and broadcast communications based on an efficient Multi-group Key graph technique. An analysis of security and performance, and a comparision of our scheme with recently proposed schemes show that our KMS induces low storage overhead compared to existing solutions (reduction reaches 83%) without increasing the communication overhead.