The electricity industry has been developed through the introduction of the smart grid. This has brought about two-way communication to the grid and its components. The smart grid has managed to increase the efficiency and reliability of the traditional power grid over the years. A smart grid has a system that is used to measure and collect readings for power consumption reflection, and the system is known as the Advanced Metering Infrastructure. The advanced metering infrastructure has its components too which are the smart metre, metre control system, collector or concentrator and communication networks (wide area network, neighbourhood area network, and home area network). The communication networks in the advanced metering infrastructure have created a vulnerability to cyber-attacks over the years. The reliability of the power grid to consumers relies on the readings from the smart metre, and this brings about the need to secure the smart metre data. This article presents a review of key management methods in advanced metering infrastructure environments. The article begins with an overview of advanced metering infrastructure and then shows the relationship between the advanced metering infrastructure and the smart grid. The review then provides the security issues related to advanced metering infrastructure. Finally, the article provides existing works of key management methods in advanced metering infrastructure and future directions in securing advanced metering infrastructure and the smart grid.

The smart grid has an important subsystem known as the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), responsible for measuring customer consumption of electricity. The AMI subsystem has smart meters as one of the components and they play a vital role in enabling communication between the utility provider and consumers. Smart meters can report real-time electricity consumption readings of the consumer to the utility. Securing this communication link from attacks remain very important for the secure transmission of readings. Different methods or approaches have been developed in the past and most of the works have high computational overheads. This paper proposes a lightweight Concealed Based Security Scheme (CBSS) for secure transmission within the AMI, providing authentication, reducing the computational overheads and energy consumption during transmission. The CBSS method is compared with the AMI Data Communication Scheme (ADCS) which does not have authentication process. The network is built in the Network Simulator 2 environment, showing the communication between the nodes. Further security is provided using a simple encryption/decryption method of 2 random numbers. The contribution of this paper is the proposed lightweight method for the AMI that authenticates the transfer of data between smart meters and other components of the AMI system. The paper also contains a simulation evaluation for the chosen design parameters of the resemblance of AMI network. The simulations show an improvement of 5% in delivery ratio, 3% throughput and 4% on energy consumed when adding security to the network.