Non-Interactive Multi-Level Key Establishment Scheme for Hierarchical Electric Power Grids

Reliable data transmission is an important aspect to ensure safety of the electric power grid. In this paper, we propose a non-interactive multi-level key establishment scheme to protect data transmission in hierarchical power grids. Our scheme enables higher-level nodes to hierarchically distribute key materials to lower-level nodes. With the key material, each node is able to locally generate a secret key shared with any other node in the hierarchy (either at the same level or at a different level). Our scheme has strong resistance to collusion attacks. Analysis and experimental results show that our scheme possesses high efficiency in terms of both computational costs and storage overhead.