An Efficiency Batch Authentication Scheme for Smart Grid Using Binary Authentication Tree

The Smart Grid (SG) is designed to replace traditional electric power infrastructure that manages electricity demand in a sustainable, reliable and economic manner. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is proposed as a critical part of the smart grid. The gateway of AMI receives and verifies a mass of data from smart meters within a required interval. This paper focuses on the computation overhead of gateway, and proposes a batch authentication scheme based on binary tree. The proposed scheme enables the gateway to batch authenticate data. The computation cost to verify all messages only requires n multiplications and 2 pairing operations where n is the number of smart meters. That significantly reduces the computation cost of gateway, especially when the number of smart meters in the AMI gets large. We analyze security and performance of proposed scheme in detail to show that the proposed scheme is both secure and efficient for AMI in smart grid.