Design of Secure Reconfigurable Power Converters

Abstract

In recent years, attacks against the power grid and the connected smart grid infrastructure have increased and have become a national security issue. The communication-based attacks include attacks with physical access to a network, as well as remote-networked attacks. The resource constrained end devices such as smart meters, power converters as well as third party appliances open additional opportunities for malicious actors. In this paper, we present a low overhead secure communication framework for the critical power infrastructure, which incorporates secure processors, such as Trusted Platform Modules to introduce secure communication in the end nodes. As a use case scenario, we demonstrate security framework for power converters.