Pairing-based authentication protocol for V2G networks in smart grid

[EN] Vehicle to Grid (V2G) network is a very important component for Smart Grid (SG), as it offers new services that help the optimization of both supply and demand of energy in the SG network and provide mobile distributed capacity of battery storage for minimizing the dependency of non-renewable energy sources. However, the privacy and anonymity of users¿ identity, confidentiality of the transmitted data and location of the Electric Vehicle (EV) must be guaranteed. This article proposes a pairing-based authentication protocol that guarantees confidentiality of communications, protects the identities of EV users and prevents attackers from tracking the vehicle. Results from computing and communications performance analyses were better in comparison to other protocols, thus overcoming signaling congestion and reducing bandwidth consumption. The protocol protects EVs from various known attacks and its formal security analysis revealed it achieves the security goals.Roman, LFA.; Gondim, PRL.; Lloret, J. (2019). Pairing-based authentication protocol for V2G networks in smart grid. Ad Hoc Networks. 90:1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2018.08.0151169

Privacy-Preserving Multi-Quality Charging in V2G network

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) network, which provides electricity charging service to the electric vehicles (EVs), is an essential part of the smart grid (SG). It can not only effectively reduce the greenhouse gas emission but also significantly enhance the efficiency of the power grid. Due to the limitation of the local electricity resource, the quality of charging service can be hardly guaranteed for every EV in V2G network. To this end, the multi-quality charging is introduced to provide quality-guaranteed service (QGS) to the qualified EVs and best effort service (BES) to the other EVs. To perform the multi-quality charging, the evaluation on the EV's attributes is necessary to determine which level of charging service can be offered to the EV. However, the EV owner's privacy such as real identity, lifestyle, location, and sensitive information in the attributes may be violated during the evaluation and authentication. In this thesis, a privacy-preserving multi-quality charging (PMQC) scheme for V2G network is proposed to evaluate the EV's attributes, authenticate its service eligibility and generate its bill without revealing the EV's private information. Specifically, by adopting ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE), the EV can be evaluated to have proper charging service without disclosing its attribute privacy. By utilizing group signature, the EV's real identity is kept confidential during the authentication and the bill generation. By hiding the EV's real identity, the EV owner's lifestyle privacy and location privacy are also preserved. Security analysis demonstrates that PMQC can achieve the EV's privacy preservation, fine-grained access control on the EVs for QGS, traceability of the EV's real identity and secure revocation on the EV's service eligibility. Performance evaluation result shows that PMQC can achieve higher efficiency in authentication and verification compared with other schemes in terms of computation overhead. Based on PMQC, the EV's computation overhead and storage overhead can be further reduced in the extended privacy-preserving multi-quality charging (ePMQC) scheme.4 month

Proposal and evaluation of authentication protocols for Smart Grid networks

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Elétrica, 2018.Uma rede Smart Grid (ou rede elétrica inteligente) representa a evolução das redes elétricas tradicionais, tornada possível graças à integração das tecnologias da informação e das comunicações com a infraestrutura elétrica. Esta integração propicia o surgimento de novos serviços, tornando a rede elétrica mais eficiente, gerando também novos desafios a serem atendidos, dentre eles a segurança do sistema. A rede SG deve garantir a confiabilidade, a integridade e a privacidade dos dados armazenados ou em transito pelo sistema, o que leva à necessidade de autenticação e controle de acesso, obrigando a todo usuário ou dispositivo a se autenticar e a realizar somente operações autorizadas. A autenticação de usuários e dispositivos é um processo muito importante para a rede SG, e os protocolos usados para esse fim devem ser capazes de proteção contra possiveis ataques (por exemplo, Man-in-the-Middle - MITM, repetição, Denegação de Serviço - DoS). Por outro lado, a autorização é tratada em conjunto com a autenticação e relacionada com as politicas de controle de acesso do sistema. Uma parte essencial para criar os protocolos de autenticação seguros envolve os esquemas de ciframento. O uso de um ou a combinação de vários esquemas afeta diretamente o desempenho do protocolo. Cada dia novos esquemas são propostos, e seu emprego nos protocolos de autenticação melhora o desempenho do sistema em comparação aos protocolos já propostos no mesmo cenário. Neste trabalho são propostos 3 (três) protocolos de autenticação seguros e de custo adequado para os cenários descritos a seguir: - Autenticação dos empregados das empresas de fornecimento de energia que procuram acesso ao sistema de forma remota; - Autenticação de Smart Meters numa Infraestrutura de medição avançada (AMI, do inglês Advanced Metering Infrastructure) baseada em nuvem computacional; e - Autenticação de veículos elétricos em uma rede V2G (do inglês, Vehicle-to-Grid). Cada um dos cenários tem caraterísticas particulares que são refletidas no projeto dos protocolos propostos. Além disso, todos os protocolos propostos neste trabalho garantem a autenticação mutua entre todas as entidades e a proteção da privacidade, confidencialidade e integridade dos dados do sistema. Uma comparação dos custos de comunicação e computação é apresentada entre os protocolos propostos neste trabalho e protocolos desenvolvidos por outros autores para cada um dos cenários. Os resultados das comparações mostram que os protocolos propostos neste trabalho têm, na maioria dos casos, o melhor desempenho computacional e de comunicações, sendo assim uma ótima escolha para a sua implementação nas redes SG. A validação formal dos protocolos propostos por meio da ferramenta AVISPA é realizada, permitindo verificar o atendimento a requisitos de segurança.Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).A Smart Grid network (or inteligent electrical network) represents the evolution of traditional electrical networks, made possible due to the integration of information and communication technologies with the electrical power grid. This integration generates new services and improves the efficiency of the electrical power grid, while new challenges appear and must be solved, including the security of the system. The SG network must assure reliability, integrity and privacy of the data stored or in trnsit in the system, leading to the need for authentication and access control, thus all users and devices must authenticate and accomplish only authorized operations. The authentication of users and devices is a very important process for the SG network, and the protocols used for this task must be able to protect against possible attacks (for example, Man- in-the-Middle - MITM, repetição, Denegação de Serviço – DoS). On the other hand, authorization is treated jointly with authentication and related to policies of access control to the system. An essential part of creating secure authentication protocols involves encryption schemes. The use of one or the combination of several schemes directly affects protocol performance. Each day new schemas are proposed, and their utilization in the authentication protocols improves the performance of the system compared to the protocols already proposed in the same scenario. In this work 3 (three) secure and cost-effective authentication protocols are proposed, for the following scenarios: - Authentication of employees of energy suply enterprises, looking for remote or local access to the system; - Authentication of Smart Meters in an Advanced Metering Infrastructure based on cloud computing; and - Authentication of electrical vehicles in a V2G (“Vehicle-to-Grid”) network. Each scenario has specific characteristics, that are reflected on the design of the proposed protocols. Moreover, such protocols assure mutual authentication among entities as well as the protection of privacy, confidentiality and integrity of system data. A comparison considering communication and computing costs is presented, involving proposed protocols and other previously published protocols, for each scenario. The results show that the proposed protocols have, in most cases, the best performance, thus constituting good choices for future implementation in SG networks. The formal validation of the proposed protocols by the use of AVISPA tool is realized, allowing to verify the compliance with security requirements

Security and Privacy in Smart Grid

Smart grid utilizes different communication technologies to enhance the reliability and efficiency of the power grid; it allows bi-directional flow of electricity and information, about grid status and customers requirements, among different parties in the grid, i.e., connect generation, distribution, transmission, and consumption subsystems together. Thus, smart grid reduces the power losses and increases the efficiency of electricity generation and distribution. Although smart grid improves the quality of grid's services, it exposes the grid to the cyber security threats that communication networks suffer from in addition to other novel threats because of power grid's nature. For instance, the electricity consumption messages sent from consumers to the utility company via wireless network may be captured, modified, or replayed by adversaries. As a consequent, security and privacy concerns are significant challenges in smart grid. Smart grid upgrade creates three main communication architectures: The first one is the communication between electricity customers and utility companies via various networks; i.e., home area networks (HANs), building area networks (BANs), and neighbour area networks (NANs), we refer to these networks as customer-side networks in our thesis. The second architecture is the communication between EVs and grid to charge/discharge their batteries via vehicle-to-grid (V2G) connection. The last network is the grid's connection with measurements units that spread all over the grid to monitor its status and send periodic reports to the main control center (CC) for state estimation and bad data detection purposes. This thesis addresses the security concerns for the three communication architectures. For customer-side networks, the privacy of consumers is the central concern for these networks; also, the transmitted messages integrity and confidentiality should be guaranteed. While the main security concerns for V2G networks are the privacy of vehicle's owners besides the authenticity of participated parties. In the grid's connection with measurements units, integrity attacks, such as false data injection (FDI) attacks, target the measurements' integrity and consequently mislead the main CC to make the wrong decisions for the grid. The thesis presents two solutions for the security problems in the first architecture; i.e., the customer-side networks. The first proposed solution is security and privacy-preserving scheme in BAN, which is a cluster of HANs. The proposed scheme is based on forecasting the future electricity demand for the whole BAN cluster. Thus, BAN connects to the electricity provider only if the total demand of the cluster is changed. The proposed scheme employs the lattice-based public key NTRU crypto-system to guarantee the confidentiality and authenticity of the exchanged messages and to further reduce the computation and communication load. The security analysis shows that our proposed scheme can achieve the privacy and security requirements. In addition, it efficiently reduces the communication and computation overhead. According to the second solution, it is lightweight privacy-preserving aggregation scheme that permits the smart household appliances to aggregate their readings without involving the connected smart meter. The scheme deploys a lightweight lattice-based homomorphic crypto-system that depends on simple addition and multiplication operations. Therefore, the proposed scheme guarantees the customers' privacy and message integrity with lightweight overhead. In addition, the thesis proposes lightweight secure and privacy-preserving V2G connection scheme, in which the power grid assures the confidentiality and integrity of exchanged information during (dis)charging electricity sessions and overcomes EVs' authentication problem. The proposed scheme guarantees the financial profits of the grid and prevents EVs from acting maliciously. Meanwhile, EVs preserve their private information by generating their own pseudonym identities. In addition, the scheme keeps the accountability for the electricity-exchange trade. Furthermore, the proposed scheme provides these security requirements by lightweight overhead; as it diminishes the number of exchanged messages during (dis)charging sessions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the total communication and computation load for V2G connection especially for EVs. FDI attack, which is one of the severe attacks that threatens the smart grid's efficiency and reliability, inserts fake measurements among the correct ones to mislead CC to make wrong decisions and consequently impact on the grid's performance. In the thesis, we have proposed an FDI attack prevention technique that protects the integrity and availability of the measurements at measurement units and during their transmission to the CC, even with the existence of compromised units. The proposed scheme alleviates the negative impacts of FDI attack on grid's performance. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme guarantees the integrity and availability of the measurements with lightweight overhead, especially on the restricted-capabilities measurement units. The proposed schemes are promising solutions for the security and privacy problems of the three main communication networks in smart grid. The novelty of these proposed schemes does not only because they are robust and efficient security solutions, but also due to their lightweight communication and computation overhead, which qualify them to be applicable on limited-capability devices in the grid. So, this work is considered important progress toward more reliable and authentic smart grid