A Novel Identity-based Key Establishment Method for Advanced Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grid

Security is fundamental to the operation of smart grid and its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). Key establishment is the core component in key management schemes and plays a crucial role in satisfying the security requirements. In recent years, many key establishment protocols have been proposed in the context of smart grids. However, their high overhead and complexity have undermined their ability to be practically employed in AMI. In this paper, we propose a novel identity-based key establishment protocol (NIKE) which employs elliptic curves at its core and has the lowest computational overhead among current secure protocols, especially at the meter side. We have given a detailed and comparative analysis of both security and computational burden for the proposed protocol as well as the previous efforts. We have evaluated the resilience of different protocols to well-known attacks by discussion, however, for the proposed protocol, we have also used AVISPA tool to formally verify its security. Compared to the previous solutions, the proposed protocol either is more secure or scores higher in performance benchmarks run on the same hardware.