IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2021 - 107

Figure 1. Illustration of an AMI network in a smart power grid.3
research topics in the area of next generation
smart power grid that houses a sophisticated
system of meters, relays, connectors, loads, and
generators.2,3
Figure 1 shows a smart power grid with twoway
communication as a mechanism to exchange
electricity and information flow between a smart
home and utility center (UC). This communication,
however, can potentially lead to important
security challenges while protecting some of the
smart grid infrastructure nodes from emerging
cyber and physical attacks.4 One of the primary
challenges in an AMI network is, therefore, the
design of a compulsively trusted and highly secure
AMI framework that achieves real-time authentication
among smart meters (SMs) andUCs.
This article proposes a hardware-assisted
framework for the AMI network to achieve end-toend
key management and enable trusted and
secure authentication in AMI systems. This framework
generates chip-specific identifiers (i.e., chipfingerprint
IDs) at real-time by exploiting the
unique characteristics of manufacturing process
variations, extracted from the fabrication imperfections
of integrated circuits (ICs).5 This framework
utilizes low-cost and efficient physical
unclonable functions (PUFs) with improved challenge-response
pair characteristics, namely,
dynamic ring oscillator-based PUF (d-ROPUF) to
obtain a large amount of authentication keys.5
An lightweight encryption technique6 is also
realized on hardware using field-programmable
July/August 2021
gate arrays (FPGA) technology, contained
within SMs, to encrypt PUF-based authentication
keys generated within an FPGA, before the
keys are transmitted over the AMI network.
Such encryption is important to ensure the
integrity of the exchanged secret keys and to
protect the private information, i.e., identity, of
the authenticated meter devices. The National
Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has
recommended using multiple levels of secret
keys for real time and robust authentication.
The results of the proposed AMI framework
are promising and offer significant security
enhancements such as fast authentication
capability and small storage overhead, as
compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.
According to our results, for a 50-year lifespan,
the total time spent to authenticate each SM for
all of the security levels (L1 to L5) is approximately
5 h. The results also demonstrate that
for each AMI network with 200 SMs, only 3.98GB
space is needed to store all encrypted PUFbased
key information for a period of 50-year
SM lifespan, satisfying the NIST real-time security
requirements.
RELATED WORK
Different AMI authentication schemes can
be categorized into two main groups, network
communication-based and hardware-assisted
schemes.
107
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2021

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