Experimental Comparison of Multicast Authentication for Wide Area Monitoring Systems

Multicast is proposed as a preferred communication mechanism for many power grid applications. One of the biggest challenges for multicast in smart grid is ensuring source authentication without violating the stringent time requirement. The research community and standardization bodies have proposed several authentication mechanisms for smart grid multicast applications. In this paper, we evaluate different authentication schemes and identify the best candidates for phasor data communication in wide area monitoring systems (WAMS). We first do an extensive literature review of existing solutions and establish a short list of schemes to evaluate. Second we make an experimental comparison of the chosen schemes in an operational smart grid pilot and evaluate the performance of these schemes by using the following metrics: computation, communication and key management overheads. The best candidates we consider are two variants of ECDSA, TV-HORS and three variants of Incomplete-key-set. We find ECDSA without pre-computed tokens and all the Incomplete-key-set variants are inapplicable for WAMS due to their high computation overhead. The ECDSA variant that uses pre-computed tokens and TV-HORS perform well in all metrics; however, TV-HORS has potential drawbacks due to a large key management overhead as a result of the frequent distribution of a large public key per source

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

A Survey on Cryptography Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid

A Smart grid is a modern electricity delivery system. It is an integration of energy systems and other necessary elements including traditional upgrades and new grid technologies with renewable generation and increased consumer storage. It uses information and communication technology (ICT) to operate, monitor and control data between the generation source and the end user. Smart grids have duplex power flow and communication to achieve high efficiency, reliability, environmental, economics, security and safety standards. However, along with unique facilities, smart grids face security challenges such as access control, connectivity, fault tolerance, privacy, and other security issues. Cyber-attacks, in the recent past, on critical infrastructure including smart grids have highlighted security as a major requirement for smart grids. Therefore, cryptography and key management are necessary for smart grids to become secure and realizable. Key management schemes are processes of key organizational frameworks, distribution, generation, refresh and key storage policies. Currently, several secure schemes, related to key management for smart grid have been proposed to achieve end-to-end secure communication. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and discussion on the current state of the key management of smart grids