Efficient and Fault-Diagnosable Authentication Scheme for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

The recently emerging Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is envisioned to be one of the most prominent features of the smart grid. Security, especially authentication, is crucial for the success of large-scale AMI deployment. Unfortunately, AMI’s natural requirements — efficiency, scalability, fault-diagnoses and reliability — cannot be fully satisfied by existing authentication schemes: per-packet signing and per-signature verification public key schemes, onetime signatures, or pairwise key-based symmetric encryption algorithms. In this paper, we propose new authentication architecture for AMI to validate the delay-tolerant metering data. We propose not only a set of efficient authentication schemes, but more importantly, their corresponding faultdiagnoses algorithms. We implement our system on emulated smart meters and commodity servers. Experiment results on simulated real-world scenarios demonstrate the practicability of our proposed system. It merely incurs substantially lighter overheads than those by the existing schemes, while it can effectively address the formidable authentication challenges in AMI. Index Terms —Authentication, digital signature, fault tolerance, fault diagnosis, smart grids, verification.