An advanced key management scheme for secure smart grid communications

In the smart grid, collecting data from remote sensors and meters such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) can help ensure safe and reliable operation, avoiding overloads and outages. Since such data is related to critical operation of the power grid, appropriate security schemes should be utilized for secure communications among the components in the smart grid. This paper proposes a key management scheme for secure data communications in a smart grid system. It is a versatile key management scheme in that it can support unicast, multicast and broadcast communications. Moreover, the proposed scheme can be tailored to the hierarchical control system structure of the smart grid. A comparative security cost analysis is performed to illustrate that the proposed scheme can achieve efficient key management.