A Lightweight Scheme to Authenticate and Secure the Communication in Smart Grids

Abstract

Self-reconfiguration in electrical power grids is a significant tool for their planning and operation during both normal and abnormal conditions. The increasing in employment of Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), as well as the rapid growth of the new communication technologies have increased the application of Feeder Automation (FA) in Distribution Networks (DNs). In a Smart Grid (SG), automation equipment, such as a Smart Breaker (SB), is used. Using either a wired or a wireless network or even a combination of both, communication between the Control Center (CC) and SBs can be made. Nowadays, wireless technology is widely used in the communication of DNs. This may cause several security vulnerabilities in the power system, such as remote attacks, with the goal of cutting off the electrical power provided to significant consumers. Therefore, to preserve the cybersecurity of the system, there is a need for a secure scheme. The available literature investments proposed a heavyweight level in security schemes, while the overhead was not considered. To overcome this drawback, this paper presents an efficient lightweight authentication mechanism with the necessary steps to ensure real-time automatic reconfiguration during a fault. As a first stage, authentication will be made between CC and SB, SB then sends the information about its status. To ensure the integrity of the authentication exchange, a hash function is used, while the symmetric algorithm is used to ensure privacy. The applicability of the suggested scheme has been proved by conducting security performance and analysis. The proposed scheme will be injected on ABB medium voltage breaker with the REF 542plus controller. Therefore, the probable benefit of the suggested scheme is the contribution to provide more flexibility for electrical utilities in terms of reducing the overall computational overhead and withstanding to various types of attacks, while also opening new prospects in FA of SGs.

A Blockchain-Based Architecture for Securing Industrial IoTs Data in Electric Smart Grid

“…The BC technology can benefit the energy system in two main ways: by changing the system architecture from a centralized model to a decentralized one and by providing a high level of security thanks to the nature of BC design [13]. After an extensive search of related work in many available databases, we found only one [11] dealing with the security of SGs in the context of the electric power transmission sector by securing the data of smart CBs. Here, we review the most similar techniques that are used in the SG sector to secure information.…”

“…This scheme also provided authentication-dependent security. Aziz et al [11] presented an efficient, lightweight authentication scheme that achieved real-time automatic network reconfiguration in the event of a fault occurring. Their scheme provided a flexible mechanism for electrical utilities, with reduced overall computational overhead and resistance to some common attacks, as a hash function was adopted for integrity purposes.…”

“…Although these schemes successfully address several security threats, they are still susceptible to other security and cybersecurity risks such as denial of service (DoS), forgery, Sybil, impersonation, modification, MITM attacks and single node crashes and bottlenecks, as discussed in detail in Table 6 and Section 8. They also depend on complex schemes such as public key infrastructure (PKI) [28,29], which imposes high computational and communication costs for signature generation and verification [11], suffers from low performance, involves high execution time, power consumption, resources, storage and bandwidth sizes.…”

“…With high-performance applications as in the industrial sector (SGs), centralized architecture becomes an inconvenient choice [8]; it is exposed to cybersecurity threats more than decentralized architecture. The attackers work to exploit the vulnerable points within the communication system to achieve their goals, imagining the nonexistent faults that can lead to disruption of the whole power generation and transmission network [9][10][11]. Internet-connected CBs have many advantages and have become economically important, especially with the availability of automation equipment and recent communication technologies.…”

A Lightweight Authenticated Key Establishment Scheme for Secure Smart Grid Communications

“…Although the proposed scheme has failed to achieve anonymity and un-traceability, it has succeeded in reducing the communication cost compared to Maier et al's scheme [8]. Aziz et al [10] applied a lightweight scheme to achieve the authentication between the smart breaker and the control center and preventing several types of attacks in the smart grid. Although this scheme has succeeded in reducing the communication cost compared to Mahmood et al's scheme [9].…”