An efficient and versatile key management protocol for secure smart grid communications

Numerous entities in a smart grid network communicate with each other via unicast, multicast, and broadcast communications in order to enhance the efficiency, reliability, and intelligence of the power supply chain. This paper proposes an efficient and scalable key management protocol for secure unicast, multicast, and broadcast communications in a smart grid network. The proposed protocol is based on a binary tree approach, and supports all these three types of secure communications by using only one binary tree. The analysis and discussion show that the proposed protocol is versatile, and hence suitable for secure smart grid communications.