Self-organised key management for the smart grid

Abstract

As Smart Grid deployments emerge around the world, their protection against cyberattacks becomes more crucial. Before protective measures are put into place, one of the main factors to be considered is key management. Smart Grid poses special requirements compared to traditional networks; however, the review of previous work reveals that existing schemes are not complete. Here we propose a scalable and distributed key management scheme for the Smart Grid based on the Web-of-Trust concept. Our proposal is build on top of a Distributed Hash Table for efficient lookups of trust relationships. The target of this scheme is to create a key management system for the Smart Grid without the need of an always available Trusted Third Party. The underlying Distributed Hash Table can be further utilised as an infrastructure to build other Smart Grid services on top of it, like secure and/or anonymous aggregation, billing, etc.