An Efficient Approach to Key Management for Bidirectional Communication in AMI System of Smart Grids

The rapid advancement of information technology in recent years has given rise to smart grids, a new generation of power systems that radically alter how traditional power grid systems operate. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a key element of the smart grid (SG), which enables two-way communication between smart home appliances and smart meter. Three unique aspects of AMI, in contrast to other systems, need special attention: the hybrid modes of message transmission, the storage and processing limitations of smart meters, and dynamic participants in demand response (DR) programs. The security of sensitive messages becomes a critical challenge in the AMI of smart grids due to communication over public networks. Many key management methods have been presented in the last few decades to ensure secure message transmission in DR groups. However, these methods still suffer from various security loopholes and performance issues. Thus, we present an efficient key management method that works efficiently for the AMI system. Furthermore, when a home appliance joins or leaves the group, the proposed approach does not require that the secret parameters of the existing smart home appliances have changed. As a result, smart device and smart meter computation costs for updating the secret parameters are lowered to O(1). Security analysis demonstrates that our method offers robust security against the majority of common cryptographic attacks. Performance analysis demonstrates that our method is much more efficient than the related methods.