MK-AMI: efficient Multi-group Key management scheme for secure communications in AMI systems

The Smart Grid (SG) is widely considered to be the informationization of the power grid. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has been regarded as a key component of the SG. The critical role of AMI in the SG has made this system a privileged target of cyber attacks. Consequently, AMI security is of very high importance for the security of the SG. For this reason, Key Management has been identified as one of the most. challenging topics in AMI development because of the great scale of SG and dynamism of connected clients with respect to tariff programs. This paper proposes a new efficient Multi-group Key management for AMI (MK-AMI) to secure data communications in the smart grid. It is a novel key management scheme that can support unicast, multicast and broadcast communications. An analysis of security and performance, and a comparison of our scheme with recently proposed schemes illustrate that MK-AMI achieves efficient key management and induces low storage and communications overheads compared to existing solutions.