DLMS/COSEM security level enhancement to construct secure advanced metering infrastructure

Abstract

This paper proposes an authentication and key management framework to strengthen the security level of the advanced metering infrastructure based on the DLMS/COSEM standard. The current DLMS/COSEM standard does not specify detailed secret key generation and distribution procedures, which induce a critical issues regarding interoperability in secure communication among AMI devices. Moreover, the protocol suffers from a key distribution problem, which can expose a session secret key supposed to be shared only by two devices to a third party node. The basic ideas are that smart meters and data collection systems perform the authentication and key exchange with AMI server using existing Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) standard, and DLMS/COSEM secret keys are created and shared securely using pre-formed secure channels. We show how the proposed framework can be realized in advanced metering infrastructure using existing standard protocols and provide preliminary security and performance comparisons with the existing related proposals.