Abstract
With the deployment of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) the legacy power grid is being transformed as smart grid. However, the extensive use of ICT makes it vulnerable to cyberattacks. Standardization of power system communication with interoperable protocols has many benefits and at the same time the standardized semantics makes it much more vulnerable to cyberattacks. IEC has published a new standard IEC 62351 which provides the security guidelines for securing power system communication against cyber-attacks. In this paper, the cybersecurity considerations for IEC 61850 Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) messages as per the IEC 62351-4 standard are discussed in detail. Further, the implementation of IEC 62351-4 security specifications for MMS messages are demonstrated through experiments in lab.
Highlights
With the integration of instrumentation, control and information communication technologies to conventional power system has led to power system automation and transition of legacy power grid to smart grid
This paper presents the experimental lab implementation of different algorithms of the IEC 62351-4 recommended cipher suites by establishing a Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection for securing IEC 61850 Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) messages
Secure IEC 61850 server and clients were emulated, and TLS connection based on IEC 62351-4 recommended security cipher suite was established successfully
Summary
With the integration of instrumentation, control and information communication technologies to conventional power system has led to power system automation and transition of legacy power grid to smart grid. IEC 623451-4 recommends different cipher suites that can be used during TLS session for achieving the security requirements. The computational latencies for establishing TLS (i.e. handshake) and during data transfer (encrypted MMS message exchanges) depends on the algorithms of cipher suites. In [19] authors presented the comparison of latencies for MMS message exchanges after TLS establishment for different cipher suites. This paper presents the experimental lab implementation of different algorithms of the IEC 62351-4 recommended cipher suites by establishing a TLS connection for securing IEC 61850 MMS messages. Where RSA algorithm is used for both key exchange and digital signatures, AES_128_CBC is used for encryption and SHA256 for HASH generation In these mandated cipher suites Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128/256 is used for encryption and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA 256/384) is used for generating
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