Efficient and fault-diagnosable authentication architecture for AMI in smart grid.

The recently emerging advanced metering infrastructure AMI is envisioned to be one of the most prominent features of 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. To validate the delay-tolerant AMI metering data, we present a new authentication architecture that boosts the utilization of a set of efficient authentication schemes. Meanwhile, in case of authentication failures, fault diagnoses are highly demanded by AMI. Thus, we develop a few corresponding fault diagnosis algorithms that precisely pinpoint the authentication failure with lightweight computational cost. We implement our system on emulated smart meters and commodity servers. Experimental results on real-world scenarios demonstrate the feasibility of our system; it merely incurs substantially lighter overheads than those by the existing schemes, while it can effectively address the formidable authentication challenges in AMI. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.