Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a key part of the smart grid; thus, one of the most important concerns is to offer a secure mutual authentication. This study focuses on communication between a smart meter and as erver on the utility side. Hence, a mutual authentication mechanism in AMI is presented based on the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and one time signature (OTS) consists of two phases: a key and signature generation phase as well as a signature verifica tion phase. The next challenge, is securing communication messages. Accordingly, a message authentication mechanism based on ECC and OTS is proposed in this paper. Such protocols are designed based on resource constraint problem on the consumer side and security requirement satisfaction in AMI. Security of the protocol with BAN logic is proved and possibility of signature forgery via the mathematical principle of birthday paradox formula is represented. In the end, security of the protocol is scrutinized with informal methods and is simulated on Java. Simulation and analytical results show that proposed protocols are more secure and efficient than similar methods against most of the security attacks

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