New Cryptographic Key Management for Smart Grid

Abstract: A smart grid is a simple upgrade of a power grid, which delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers. It uses two-way digital communication in order to control appliances at consumers’ households. Such system saves energy, reduces costs and increases reliability and transparency. It includes smart meters, which enable communication with the central system. Unlike home energy monitors, smart meters can gather data for remote reporting. In spite of the fact that deployment of a smart grid is enormously beneficial, several security and privacy concerns arise. An attacker could possibly intercept traffic going to the central system, send commands to the smart meters or inject code into the backend control system. Security for such systems covers both key management on a scale involving a large number of credentials and keys, and local cryptographic processing on the sensors such as encryption and digital signatures. Current practice for smart meters utilizes several methods for maintaining security, however none of them is considered to be sufficiently efficient. In this study, contemporary methods for key management in a smart grid will be examined and evaluated for one specific scenario. Due to the fact that the current systems have to operate with a large amount of data, the key factor for this analysis will be limited space and computation power. Consequently, design of a new economic key management in combination with efficient cryptography will be designed.