A review and vision on authentication and privacy preservation schemes in smart grid network

Abstract

Security and privacy preservation are important research challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, wherein the information related to customers' habit is seamlessly collected for further analytics. One such IoT application; Smart grid (SG) network uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to automate the traditional electricity network between customers and utility companies. In the SG setting, on one side, there is a seamless exchange of energy consumption information, demand change and price change messages between customers and utility grid; on the other side, it offers various cyber security challenges. To avoid some‐one intercepting these messages and modify personal information, it is necessary to communicate these messages using an appropriate security and privacy preservation scheme. The objective of this article is conduct a comprehensive survey on existing security and privacy techniques being developed for the SG network. The survey presented in this article is motivated by the earlier research attempts on cyber security issues in SG, key management techniques, authentication schemes and privacy preservation techniques in SG network. The paper provides a wide review on various authentication techniques till recent developments on lightweight authentication and the privacy preservation techniques including encryption based privacy preservation using homomorphic encryption, elliptic curve cryptography, and lattice cryptography. Furthermore, the article presents our vision on privacy and utility trade‐off issues, privacy enhancement using blockchains, lightweight cryptography, and security challenges in fog node.