Secure Key Management Scheme for Ami in Smart Grid

The smart grid has been introduced as the next generation power grid. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the key components in this grid. It provides bidirectional communication between consumers and management entities in the utility side. This bidirectional nature communication flow has made AMI vulnerable to various cyber attacks. So, cyber security has become an important concern in this context. Key management for securing communications between a large amount of smart meters (SMs) and a master station (MS) in the utility premise is one of the most important components of the AMI security protocols. AMI has special characteristics and features in comparison with other IT systems, to design an efficient scheme these features should be considered. Features like resource constraints of smart meters and low bandwidth of communication lines. In this paper we are going to design a light weight key management scheme with a novel key refreshment policy that decrease the network overhead, which makes symmetric keys to secure communications between SMs and MS using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) parameters and simple cryptographic algorithms like