A Key Transport Protocol for Advance Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Based on Public Key Cryptography

Advance metering infrastructure (AMI) is an important element of the Smart Grid as it is expectable to simplify the transport of meter reading and control information from meters to the utility provider. Smart meters are generally located in insecure area of house and can potentially be tampered which can lead towards exposure of consumer usage. Security is an important factor to achieve secure communication and providing protection from malicious attacks in these Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) based smart grids in unfavorable situations. The management of keys especially key distribution in AMI is an open challenge. The proposed protocol consists of four phases: Initialization, Registration, Mutual authentication and Key exchange to establish a session key by the Head-End System (HES) and the Smart Meter (SM) after authenticating each other. The paper also contains discussion on the security of the proposed protocol and simulation evaluation for selected communication parameters.