The smart grid is a network of computers and power infrastructures that monitor and manage energy usage and uses intelligent transmission and distribution networks to deliver electricity for improving the electric system's reliability and efficiency. With grid controls, energy transmission management could be enhanced and resilience to control-system failures would be increased. Although deploying the smart grid has numerous social and technical benefits, several security concerns arise. In 2012, Xia and Wang proposed a secure key distribution for the smart grid. They claimed their protocol is strong enough to defend against security attacks. In this paper, we investigate the security of Xia and Wang's protocol. More precisely, we show that once the smart meter generates a session key with the service provider, the smart meter could easily forge the new legitimate session key without the service provider's participation. In order to remedy the security flaw, we propose a simple and secure improvement of Xia and Wang's protocol. Our protocol is secure and fair to generate the session key between the smart meter and the service provider.
The smart grid is a network of computers and power infrastructures that monitor and manage energy usage and uses intelligent transmission and distribution networks to deliver electricity for improving the electric system's reliability and efficiency. With grid controls, energy transmission management could be enhanced and resilience to control-system failures would be increased. Although deploying the smart grid has numerous social and technical benefits, several security concerns arise. In 2012, Xia and Wang proposed a secure key distribution for the smart grid. They claimed their protocol is strong enough to defend against security attacks. In this paper, we investigate the security of Xia and Wang's protocol. More precisely, we show that once the smart meter generates a session key with the service provider, the smart meter could easily forge the new legitimate session key without the service provider's participation. In order to remedy the security flaw, we propose a simple and secure improvement of Xia and Wang's protocol. Our protocol is secure and fair to generate the session key between the smart meter and the service provider.
Unlike traditional power networks, the smart grid power system has the ability to arrange the power supply in real time to the customer for active power consumption. Therefore, it can avoid excess electricity generation. In addition, based on the current power consumption, the power service providers can measure the expected power generation amount to stabilize the power system. Compared with traditional power networks, the characteristics of the smart grid power system make it easier to suffer from several types of security threats and attacks such as impersonation, eavesdropping and message modification etc. In order to strength the security of smart grid networks, a robust and efficient authentication protocol should provide to mutual authentication and session key agreement. Since the communications between the control center and the substation is protected by the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system, we focus on the secure communication between the substation and the smart appliances. In this paper, a robust and efficient authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography is proposed to achieve mutual authentication and key agreement between the substation and the smart appliances. In addition, the proposed protocol not only resists replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and man-in-middle attacks, but also provides the session key security and the known-key security.
Abstract Entity authentication and key exchange are fundamental prerequisites for ensuring the security of various emerging smart networks. However, most existing classical schemes are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers. Recently, Prateek et al proposed a privacy-preserving mutual authentication scheme for smart metering infrastructure in smart grids. The authors claimed that their scheme is unconditionally secure and could resist various known security attacks, including impersonation attacks, eavesdropping attacks, and replay attacks. However, in this article, we demonstrate that there are serious security flaws in the proposed scheme. First, the scheme fails to ensure that two legitimate parties can reliably share a common session key, leading to a potential authentication failure. Second, an eavesdropper can exploit entangle-measure attacks to obtain partial information about the shared session key. Additionally, due to the inherent randomness of quantum measurements, the session key shared between two entities in each session is unpredictable. Consequently, the session keys distributed across different sessions may not be identical, further contributing to authentication failure. Finally, we provide an improvement to address these security flaws while preserving the original scheme’s advantageous features.
The IoT-enabled Smart Grid uses IoT smart devices to collect the private electricity data of consumers and send it to service providers over the public network, which leads to some new security problems. To ensure the communication security in a smart grid, many researches are focusing on using authentication and key agreement protocols to protect against cyber attacks. Unfortunately, most of them are vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we analyze the security of an existent protocol by introducing an insider attacker, and show that their scheme cannot guarantee the claimed security requirements under their adversary model. Then, we present an improved lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol, which aims to enhance the security of IoT-enabled smart grid systems. Furthermore, we proved the security of the scheme under the real-or-random oracle model. The result shown that the improved scheme is secure in the presence of both internal attackers and external attackers. Compared with the original protocol, the new protocol is more secure, while keeping the same computation efficiency. Both of them are 0.0552 ms. The communication of the new protocol is 236 bytes, which is acceptable in smart grids. In other words, with similar communication and computation cost, we proposed a more secure protocol for smart grids.
Smart grid solutions enable utilities and customers to better monitor and control energy use via information and communications technology. Information technology is intended to improve the future electric grid's reliability, efficiency, and sustainability by implementing advanced monitoring and control systems. However, leveraging modern communications systems also makes the grid vulnerable to cyberattacks. Here we report the first use of quantum key distribution (QKD) keys in the authentication of smart grid communications. In particular, we make such demonstration on a deployed electric utility fiber network. The developed method was prototyped in a software package to manage and utilize cryptographic keys to authenticate machine-to-machine communications used for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). This demonstration showcases the feasibility of using QKD to improve the security of critical infrastructure, including future distributed energy resources (DERs), such as energy storage.
To meet the increasing demand for electricity and to have a more reliable and resilient electric grid against conventional and extreme events, grid modernization is more crucial now than ever before. This will require the development and deployment of devices that provide advanced communication capabilities. The overall efficiency, reliability, and resilience of the smart grid will be inextricably linked to the exchange of information between these devices. Unfortunately, the increased information flow will increase the potential attack surface and introduce new vulnerabilities. While a smarter grid will depend critically on information flow, these benefits will be accrued only if that information can be protected. Nowadays, information is secured in smart grids primarily through cryptography. However, with the increasing number of sophisticated attacks as well as the increasing computational power, the security of the “classical” cryptographic algorithms is threatened. Quantum information science offers solutions to this problem, specifically quantum key distribution (QKD), which provides a means for the generation and secure distribution of symmetric cryptographic keys. The security of QKD stems ultimately from the very nature of quantum physics. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of QKD to the various smart grid sectors and specific use cases. We have identified 18 smart grid use cases of interest for QKD suitability together with 7 QKD factors used for the assessment of the various use cases. For each use case, the impact to security of the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and/or availability is specified. In addition, the suitability of QKD is assessed for each use case with respect to multiple factors.
The study investigates how quantum cryptography can be employed to improve security in smart grid communication networks. Attempting to use the BB84 QKD protocol, it allows secure creation and management of those cryptographic keys that cannot be broken with the help of quantum and traditional hacking techniques. It depends on symmetric encryption mechanisms like AES to provide high data confidentiality during transmission. Regarding the key management, the system provides a key management server that distributes keys to the grid nodes and performs key updating to ensure control with the managing authority. It also presents reliability under practical conditions through performance analogs such as Quantum Bit Error Rates (QBER), and system latency. This approach shows that quantum cryptography can provide a highly secure and efficient communication network for the next-generation smart grid.