A secure way of exchanging the secret keys in advanced metering infrastructure

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) security has become a challenging issue now days because of its integration with the external networks, remote system, and internet world. Today's metering infrastructure employs computer based monitoring and control operations to enable application of one network to exchange data with other application of different network. Communication protocol, network topologies, and computerization plays crucial roles to make the metering infrastructure advanced and further make a grid smarter. On the other hand, cyber attacks already associated with such computer networks and communication protocol can easily affect the communication of AMI applications. Therefore, from trespasser point of view, in this paper, we explore the various possible types of undesirable security threats followed by desirable security attributes required for the AMI. The paper further describes and implements a signature based station-to-station protocol for exchanging the secret shared keys among the AMI applications to get rid from undesirable security threats.