Authentication Methodology for Securing Machine-to-Machine Communication in Smart Grid

Abstract

The bidirectional communication between the smart grid users and utility company is facilitated through Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) comprising numerous smart meters, sensors, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices by employing Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication. Triggered by advances in the M2M technologies recently, the smart meters do not require any human intervention to characterize power demand and energy distribution. While there are many challenges in the design of the smart grid communications network, security is a major obstacle in realizing smart grid communication. This is because of the convergence of the advanced IoT and M2M technologies at the smart grid arising many new unforeseen challenges leading to security vulnerabilities and malicious threats. Therefore, practical and lightweight authentication mechanism for fulfilling the specific requirements of the smart grid communication should be carefully taken into consideration and adequate authentication methodology should be developed tailored for the smart grid context. In this vein, in this chapter, we first overview the M2M communication framework in the smart grid system and highlight its shortcomings including security vulnerabilities such as communication trust, and privacy issues. In order to deal with the security concerns, a lightweight message authentication method is presented to carry out mutual authentication among the smart meters distributed at the various hierarchical networks of the smart grid. The adopted lightweight authentication method is based on Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. A cryptographic analysis of the adopted authentication method demonstrates its ability to satisfy the desirable security demands of the smart grid communications. Simulation results are also provided to demonstrate the viability of the adopted authentication method. In addition, the need for developing another specific type of authentication for securing targeted broadcast in the smart grid system is discussed and the applicability of Key Policy Attributed Based Encryption (KP-ABE) is investigated for this purpose. It is shown that the smart grid’s control center can employ KP-ABE to broadcast a single, encrypted message to specific groups of recipients whereby each group consists of numerous users. Each user in the targeted group is able to individually exploit the defined key policy to decrypt the broadcasted message. It is demonstrated that in such highly specialized communication scenario, the adopted KP-ABE targeted broadcast methodology is capable of eliminating the need to issue redundant/unicast messages to ensure both communication and computation efficiency while protecting the confidentiality of the exchanged information in the smart grid.