Key management for Smart Grid based on asymmetric key-wrapping

摘要

Cyber security is considered as a critical issue which must be addressed early during the transition from the current aging electric power grid into the expected Smart Grid. Key management is the fundamental supporting cryptographic technologies for Smart Grid cyber security. This paper focuses on remote key generation and distribution for Smart Grid, especially computation-saving mechanisms for meters. Specifically, we specialize asymmetric key-wrapping to the Smart Grid application scenario, and further suggest an instantiation of remotely generating and distributing keys for Smart Grid, which is an issue raised by National Institute of Standards and Technology. In this way, we achieve a key-wrapping adapter, retrofitting an encryption system to work with an incompatible key-management architecture and seamlessly supporting different options of cryptosystems for smart meters. The proposed scheme has low computational cost at weak smart meters, because of the weaker security assumption of the wrapping algorithm and the transfer of computational cost from meters to servers.