LKM-AMI: A Lightweight Key Management Scheme for Secure two Way Communications between Smart Meters and HAN Devices of AMI System in Smart Grid

Smart Grid (SG) is a modernized power grid. Nowadays changing the power grid system into a smart grid is revolution and evolution. Owing to the widespread use of wireless communication technologies in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) of SG, security is one of the most significant and challenging problem. A specific feature of AMI systems is that it requires hybrid transmission modes of data which includes unicast, multicast and broadcast communication modes. Moreover, Smart Meters (SMs) and smart home appliances may have limited computing and storage capability and only authorized Home Area Network (HAN) appliances may communicate with SMs. Various key management systems have been presented to address these issues. However, performance and /or security issues are still exist in most of them. To meet these distinctive requirements and ensure confidentiality during communications in HAN of AMI, secure and robust key management scheme is required. This paper proposes a key management scheme tailored for HAN with significantly lower rekeying overhead and enhanced robustness which allows the SM and HAN devices to share a session key between them. In our scheme, when any smart device joins/leaves the system, there is no need to update the keys of existing devices. As a result, the rekeying cost is decreased to O(1). Compared with existing key management schemes, the proposed scheme achieves fast key distribution and message transmission between SM and the HAN devices while ensuring the privacy. The results illustrate that our scheme can outperform the related schemes in terms of rekeying cost while ensuring privacy protection.

Automated summary

Smart Grid is a modernized power grid system that requires a secure and robust key management scheme to ensure confidentiality during communication in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). This paper proposes a tailored key management scheme for Home Area Networks (HAN) in AMI, which significantly reduces rekeying overhead and enhances privacy protection.