An Efficient Key Management Scheme for Secure Demand-Response Communications in Smart Grid

Smart Grid (SG) is considered as the next generation power grid, due to its efficiency, resilience, reliability and sustainability. An important feature that will make the SG more reliable and lead to mutual benefits for both customers and power utilities is the Demand Response (DR). DR refers to a set of actions with the aim of dynamically reducing energy demand at specific times and in specific locations in response to a relative shortage in supply. In this paper, we focus on the security of DR and we propose a new key management scheme for SG to secure DR communications. The proposed scheme is based on a novel multi-group key graph structure that supports the management of multiple and dynamic DR programs simultaneously for each customer. A security and performance analysis is conducted to show the effectiveness of our solution.