Key Management Systems for Smart Grid Advanced Metering Infrastructure: A Survey

Smart Grids are evolving as the next generation power systems that involve changes in the traditional ways of generation, transmission and distribution of power. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the key components in smart grids. An AMI comprises of systems and networks, that collects and analyzes data received from smart meters. In addition, AMI also provides intelligent management of various power-related applications and services based on the data collected from smart meters. Thus, AMI plays a significant role in the smooth functioning of smart grids. AMI is a privileged target for security attacks as it is made up of systems that are highly vulnerable to such attacks. Providing security to AMI is necessary as adversaries can cause potential damage against infrastructures and privacy in smart grid. One of the most effective and challenging topic's identified, is the Key Management System (KMS), for sustaining the security concerns in AMI. Therefore, KMS seeks to be a promising research area for future development of AMI. This survey work highlights the key security issues of advanced metering infrastructures and focuses on how key management techniques can be utilized for safeguarding AMI. First of all, we explore the main features of advanced metering infrastructures and identify the relationship between smart grid and AMI. Then, we introduce the security issues and challenges of AMI. We also provide a classification of the existing works in literature that deal with secure key management system in AMI. Finally, we identify possible future research directions of KMS in AMI

Communication Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) usually consists of a large number of small, low-cost devices that have limited energy supply, computation, memory, and communication capacities. Recently, WSNs have drawn a lot of attention due to their broad applications in both military and civilian domains. Communication security is essential to the success of WSN applications, especially for those mission-critical applications working in unattended and even hostile environments. However, providing satisfactory security protection in WSNs has ever been a challenging task due to various network & resource constraints and malicious attacks. This motivates the research on communication security for WSNs. This dissertation studies communication security in WSNs with respect to three important aspects. The first study addresses broadcast/multicast security in WSNs. We propose a multi-user broadcast authentication technique, which overcomes the security vulnerability of existing solutions. The proposed scheme guarantees immediate broadcast authentication by employing public key cryptography, and achieves the efficiency through integrating various techniques from different domains. We also address multicast encryption to solve data confidentiality concern for secure multicast. We propose an efficient multicast key management scheme supporting a wide range of multicast semantics, which utilizes the fact that sensors are both routers and end-receivers. The second study addresses data report security in WSNs. We propose a location-aware end-to-end security framework for WSNs, in which secret keys are bound to geographic locations so that the impact of sensor compromise are limited only to their vicinity. The proposed scheme effectively defeats not only bogus data injection attacks but also various DoS attacks. In this study, we also address event boundary detection as a specific case of secure data aggregation in WSNs. We propose a secure and fault-tolerant event boundary detection scheme, which securely detects the boundaries of large spatial events in a localized statistic manner. The third study addresses random key pre-distribution in WSNs. We propose a keyed-hash-chain-based key pool generation technique, which leads to a more efficient key pre-distribution scheme with better security resilience in the case of sensor compromise

Smart Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent development of communication and sensor technology results in the growth of a new attractive and challenging area - wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A wireless sensor network which consists of a large number of sensor nodes is deployed in environmental fields to serve various applications. Facilitated with the ability of wireless communication and intelligent computation, these nodes become smart sensors which do not only perceive ambient physical parameters but also be able to process information, cooperate with each other and self-organize into the network. These new features assist the sensor nodes as well as the network to operate more efficiently in terms of both data acquisition and energy consumption. Special purposes of the applications require design and operation of WSNs different from conventional networks such as the internet. The network design must take into account of the objectives of specific applications. The nature of deployed environment must be considered. The limited of sensor nodes� resources such as memory, computational ability, communication bandwidth and energy source are the challenges in network design. A smart wireless sensor network must be able to deal with these constraints as well as to guarantee the connectivity, coverage, reliability and security of network's operation for a maximized lifetime. This book discusses various aspects of designing such smart wireless sensor networks. Main topics includes: design methodologies, network protocols and algorithms, quality of service management, coverage optimization, time synchronization and security techniques for sensor networks

Modified Hill-Cipher and CRT Methods in Galois Field GF (2^M)for Cryptography

Security can only be as strong as the weakest link. In this world of Cryptography, it is now well established, that the weakest link lies in the implementation of cryptographic algorithms. Galois field is extensively used in coding. Recently Galois field particularly GF(2^M) has been used for Cryptography. Hill-cipher is an old symmetric key Technique of Cryptography. In this project, a novel method of Hill-cipher has been introduced in Cryptography. This new type of cipher matrix utilizes. The polynomials as element in GF(2^M) . Simulation and results confirm the utility such a data security in a private network. In addition to this, encryption and decryption of data are implemented in GF(2^M) using the principle of data Chinese Remainder Theorem