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

TLDR

Security is fundamental to smart grid operation, and key establishment is a core component of key management, yet many protocols have been proposed with high overhead and complexity that limit practical deployment in AMI. The authors propose a novel identity‑based key establishment protocol using elliptic curves that achieves the lowest computational overhead among secure protocols, especially for meters. The protocol’s security and computational burden were analyzed comparatively, and its resilience to attacks was formally verified with the AVISPA tool. Compared to prior solutions, the protocol is either more secure or outperforms them in performance benchmarks on the same hardware, addressing the high overhead issue.

Abstract

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 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.