Efficient Public-Key Revocation Management for Secure Smart Meter Communications Using One-Way Cryptographic Accumulators

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 can be used to reduce the overhead of key management. However, it 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 scheme by utilizing cryptographic accumulators which not only reduces the space requirements for revocation information but also enables convenient distribution of revocation information to all smart meters. We implemented this one-way cryptographic accumulator-based revocation scheme on ns- 3 using IEEE 802.11s mesh standard as a model for AMI and demonstrated its superior performance with respect to traditional methods of CRL management through extensive simulations.