HIBaSS: hierarchical identity-based signature scheme for AMI downlink transmission

The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is the key to demand-side management system in smart grid. The communication over AMI consists of plenty important data, which have different security requirements. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical identity-based signature scheme (HIBaSS) to enhance the sender authentication for downlink transmission of AMI. The downlink in AMI mainly distributes control messages such as price and tariff information to the smart meters. Unlike the metering data in the uplink transmission that requires confidentiality, most of the control messages in downlink only require data integrity and sender authentication. Moreover, since most of the control messages are valid for a relatively long time period (e.g., an hour), more complicated but stronger cryptographic schemes can be applied in downlink AMI. In our proposed HIBaSS, each smart meter does not trust a signature from a single data aggregate point (DAP) although it includes the original signature from the authentication server (AS), because a smart meter has no way to verify a message or a DAP directly with the AS. Instead, a smart meter receives a group signature created by all the DAPs with certificates from the AS that prevents the messages from forgery, manipulation and repudiation. The performance evaluation also shows that HIBaSS is efficient enough to be applied in the AMI downlink transmission. Copyright (c) 2015John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.