Communication-efficient Certificate Revocation Management for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) forms a communication network for the collection of power data from smart meters in Smart Grid. As the communication within an AMI needs to be secure, public-key cryptography (PKC) can be used to reduce the overhead of key management. However, PKC still has certain challenges in terms of certificate revocation and management. In particular, distribution and storage of the Certificate Revocation List (CRL), which holds the revoked certificates, is a major challenge due to its overhead. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel revocation management approach by utilizing cryptographic accumulators which reduces the space requirements for revocation information significantly and thus enables efficient distribution of such information to all smart meters. We implemented the proposed approach on both ns-3 network simulator and an actual AMI testbed developed at FIU and demonstrated its superior performance with respect to traditional methods for CRL management.