An efficient cryptography key management for secure communications in smart metering

Abstract

Smart Grid (SG) is used in power systems to enhance environmental sustainability and increase the efficiency of energy management. In Smart Grid systems, Smart Meter (SM) is one of the most important devices. The SM is an advanced energy meter that receives data from the load devices of end users and computes the customer’s energy consumption. After that these smart meter transfers the information to the utility company and/or system operator. The secure data transmission is the main issue between the smart meters to the smart grid. Because the advanced metering architecture is vulnerable to the cyber-attacks. In order to ensure the security of smart meter data, the cryptography based encryption techniques are used in the SG. In this paper, the secure data transmission between the SM and the SG is performed by RSA cryptography. The communication over the devices performed by Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK). Here, the data from the SM encrypted using RSA encryption technique and then it transmitted using BPSK to SG. At last, at the smart grid the RSA decryption technique is used to decrypt the power values from various loads. The introduced RSA based encryption key management mechanism used to provide the end to end security in the smart metering communications. The access of the data is limited by providing the key to the authorized end users for enhancing the confidentiality of the data transmission. This proposed method is named as BPSK-RSA methodology. The performance of this BPSK-RSA methodology evaluated using energy consumption of the load devices. Then the performance of BPSK-RSA methodology is compared with DFT based CHE in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE). By taking the average, the MSE of BPSK-RSA methodology is improved at 5.02% than the DFT based CHE. The performance of the BPSK-RSA methodology is also compared with ECC-SM method in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Throughput (TH) and End to End Delay (EED). The PDR, TH and EED of BPSK-RSA methodology are improved at 2.95%, 6.24% and 19.64% than the ECC-SM method at 100 smart meter placement.