Secure Critical Traffic of the Electric Sector over Time-Sensitive Networking

Abstract

The convergence of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) in the same network is essential for upcoming digitized scenarios, such as the Electric Sector, Smart-Grid, and Substation Automation Systems (SAS). The typical separation of these two areas in the traditional Ethernet standard is increasingly disappearing. Furthermore, security requirements must be fulfilled in the involved systems and infrastructures. It is the case of the Electric Sector, which is aware of this necessity and it is trying to protect all digitized data streams, even the most critical one with tight real-time requirements. The technology that allows this OT/IT integration is Deterministic Ethernet. The standard and interoperable Deterministic Ethernet alternative is named Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standard. TSN offers a convergent, interoperable, deterministic, and uniform network. However, it lacks from security mechanisms for real-time traffic. This paper presents a concept-proof work used to prove that the hard real-time traffic used in the power substations can be protected using wire-speed cryptography and data-flow hardware processing approach.