Security Challenge in the Smart Grid

Abstract

Whether we consider the overall smart grid or the micro grids paradigm (as discussed in Chap. 2), security is an important issue which cannot be overlooked. The available smart metering technologies including the AMI often arise privacy concerns since they rely on centralizing personal energy consumption information of the users at their smart meters. In the Netherlands, there was a legal ruling in 2009 to make it mandatory to consider privacy issues of using smart meters [1]. Also, in the US policy adopted by NIST stated that there should be privacy for design approach for smart grid communications [2]. These privacy concerns can be addressed by appropriately authenticating the smart meters. Such a solution, however, needs to take into consideration the limited resources (like low memory and computational capacity) of the smart meters. So, any authentication scheme for smart grid communication requires careful design so as to enforce adequate security while placing minimal burden on the already limited resources of the smart meters. In this chapter, we discuss a light-weight message authentication method for securing communication among various smart meters at different points of the smart grid. Our adopted method is based on the Diffie–Hellman key establishment protocol and hash-based message authentication code that allows smart meters to make mutual authentication and achieve message authentication in a light-weight fashion. That is, it does not result in high delay and exchanges few signal messages in the message authentication phase.