A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications

A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE

A Touch of Evil: High-Assurance Cryptographic Hardware from Untrusted Components

The semiconductor industry is fully globalized and integrated circuits (ICs) are commonly defined, designed and fabricated in different premises across the world. This reduces production costs, but also exposes ICs to supply chain attacks, where insiders introduce malicious circuitry into the final products. Additionally, despite extensive post-fabrication testing, it is not uncommon for ICs with subtle fabrication errors to make it into production systems. While many systems may be able to tolerate a few byzantine components, this is not the case for cryptographic hardware, storing and computing on confidential data. For this reason, many error and backdoor detection techniques have been proposed over the years. So far all attempts have been either quickly circumvented, or come with unrealistically high manufacturing costs and complexity. This paper proposes Myst, a practical high-assurance architecture, that uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, and provides strong security guarantees, even in the presence of multiple malicious or faulty components. The key idea is to combine protective-redundancy with modern threshold cryptographic techniques to build a system tolerant to hardware trojans and errors. To evaluate our design, we build a Hardware Security Module that provides the highest level of assurance possible with COTS components. Specifically, we employ more than a hundred COTS secure crypto-coprocessors, verified to FIPS140-2 Level 4 tamper-resistance standards, and use them to realize high-confidentiality random number generation, key derivation, public key decryption and signing. Our experiments show a reasonable computational overhead (less than 1% for both Decryption and Signing) and an exponential increase in backdoor-tolerance as more ICs are added

A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture

Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests, individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Non-conventional digital signatures and their implementations – A review

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19713-5_36The current technological scenario determines a profileration of trust domains, which are usually defined by validating the digital identity linked to each user. This validation entails critical assumptions about the way users’ privacy is handled, and this calls for new methods to construct and treat digital identities. Considering cryptography, identity management has been constructed and managed through conventional digital signatures. Nowadays, new types of digital signatures are required, and this transition should be guided by rigorous evaluation of the theoretical basis, but also by the selection of properly verified software means. This latter point is the core of this paper. We analyse the main non-conventional digital signatures that could endorse an adequate tradeoff betweeen security and privacy. This discussion is focused on practical software solutions that are already implemented and available online. The goal is to help security system designers to discern identity management functionalities through standard cryptographic software libraries.This work was supported by Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) under the project S2013/ICE-3095-CM (CIBERDINE) and the Spanish Government project TIN2010-19607

New Blind Muti-signature Schemes based on ECDLP

In various types of electronic transactions, including election systems and digital cash schemes, user anonymity and authentication are always required. Blind signatures are considered the most important solutions to meeting these requirements. Many studies have focused on blind signature schemes; however, most of the studied schemes are single blind signature schemes. Although blind multi-signature schemes are available, few studies have focused on these schemes. In this article, blind multi-signature schemes are proposed based on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). The proposed schemes are based on the GOST R34.10-2012 digital signature standard and the EC-Schnorr digital signature scheme, and they satisfy blind multi-signature security requirements and have better computational performance than previously proposed schemes. The proposed schemes can be applied in election systems and digital cash schemes

Secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 protocol for vehicle-to-grid networks

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new communication paradigm between Electric Vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG). In order to ensure seamless communications between mobile EVs and the electric vehicle supply equipment, the support of ubiquitous and transparent mobile IP communications is essential in V2G networks. However, enabling mobile IP communications raises real concerns about the possibility of tracking the locations of connected EVs through their mobile IP addresses. In this paper, we employ certificate-less public key cryptography in synergy with the restrictive partially blind signature technique to construct a secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 (SP-PMIPv6) protocol for V2G networks. SP-PMIPv6 achieves low authentication latency while protecting the identity and location privacy of the mobile EV. We evaluate the SP-PMIPv6 protocol in terms of its authentication overhead and the information-theoretic uncertainty derived by the mutual information metric to show the high level of achieved anonymity