Wireless mesh networks are being considered as the most adequate topology for deployment in the neighborhood area network (NAN) domain in the smart‐grid infrastructure, because its features such as self‐organizing, scalability, and cost‐efficiency complement to the NAN requirements. To provide security functionality to the NAN, the key refreshment strategy of the simultaneous authentication of equals or the efficient mesh security association protocol is an efficient way to make the network more resilient against various cyberattacks. However, it is discovered that when the key refreshment strategy is used, the efficient mesh security association protocol demonstrates a security vulnerability, leading to denial of service attacks. In this paper, a simple hash‐based encryption scheme is proposed to prevent the unprotected messages from being replayed by the adversary with an enhancement to the key refreshment scheme to improve the resilience of the mesh key holder security handshake. The Protocol Composition Logic is used to describe the logical correctness of the proposed scheme, while the Process Analysis Toolkit is used to formally verify the security functionality against the malicious attacks. The efficiency analysis and the simulation results prove that the proposed scheme is reliable and efficient. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are being considered as most adequate for deployment in the Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) domain of the smart grid infrastructure because their features such as self-organizing, scalability and cost-efficiency complement the NAN requirements. To enhance the security of the WMNs, the key refreshment strategy for the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) or the Efficient Mesh Security Association (EMSA) protocols is an efficient way to make the network more resilient against the cyber-attacks. However, a security vulnerability is discovered in the EMSA protocol when using the key refreshment strategy. The first message of the Mesh Key Holder Security Handshake (MKHSH) can be forged and replayed back in the next cycles of the key refreshment leading to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In this paper, a simple one-way hash function based scheme is proposed to prevent the unprotected message from being replayed together with an enhancement to the key refreshment scheme to improve the resilience of the MKHSH. The Protocol Composition Logic (PCL) is used to verify the logical correctness of the proposed scheme, while the Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT) is used to evaluate the security functionality against the malicious attacks.
The evolution of the traditional electricity infrastructure into smart grids promises more reliable and efficient power management, more energy aware consumers and inclusion of renewable sources for power generation. These fruitful promises are attracting initiatives by various nations all over the globe in various fields of academia. However, this evolution relies on the advances in the information technologies and communication technologies and thus is inevitably prone to various risks and threats. Even though many solutions have been proposed in the recent literature to overcome the security threats in smart grid networks, many issues still need to be addressed to make smart grids a reliable and efficient innovation. In this thesis, we first introduce the background, network architecture, security threats and the security requirements of smart grid networks. Our work focuses on the security aspects of Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) subsystems of smart grid. We present some of the prominent threats and attacks, specific to this subsystem, which violate the specific security goals requisite for its reliable operation. The proposed solutions and countermeasures for these security issues presented in the recent literature have been deeply reviewed to identify the promising solutions with respect to the specific security goals. Then we propose an improved VI dynamic key refreshment strategy for mesh security in the NAN and an authentication scheme based on software defined network (SDN) using dynamic one-way accumulators. The proposed dynamic key refreshment scheme can protect the mesh network system based on IEEE 802.11s standard from DoS attacks during the key refreshment whereby the intruder could launch the attack using the information from previous key refreshment cycle as proposed in the original key refreshment scheme. The use of simple hash based operation makes the scheme cost effective for the resource limited network devices. The proposed scheme also adds an enhancement to the sub-protocol of the original key refreshment scheme for enhanced security and reliability. The proposed SDN based authentication scheme employs one-way dynamic accumulators combined with zero-knowledge proofs for easy and cost efficient authentication process. The availability of the cross authentication among different NAN devices enables us to replicate the mesh network architecture. Using SDN as the backbone of the scheme helps us accommodate the advances of the upcoming wireless technologies where we can update the changes in the scheme conveniently. Our analysis shows that the proposed schemes can achieve the requisite authentication while withstanding multiple attacks and the balance between security and system performance is also achieved.
The evolution of the traditional electricity infrastructure into smart grids promises more reliable and efficient power management, more energy aware consumers and inclusion of renewable sources for power generation. These fruitful promises are attracting initiatives by various nations all over the globe in various fields of academia. However, this evolution relies on the advances in the information technologies and communication technologies and thus is inevitably prone to various risks and threats. This work focuses on the security aspects of HAN and NAN subsystems of smart grids. The chapter presents some of the prominent attacks specific to these subsystems, which violate the specific security goals requisite for their reliable operation. The proposed solutions and countermeasures for these security issues presented in the recent literature have been reviewed to identify the promising solutions with respect to the specific security goals. The paper is concluded by presenting some of the challenges that still need to be addressed.
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