Secure, intuitive and low-cost device authentication for Smart Grid networks

Abstract

Security concerns about the Smart Grid are becoming more prevalent as the deployment of grid becomes more widespread. In this paper, we propose secure and intuitive device authentication techniques for the Smart Grid enabled Home Area Networks (HANs). We assume a distributed architecture for the HAN which consists of the smart appliances, the smart meter and the gateway. In this architecture, the operating schedules of the appliances are controlled by the gateway based on the pricing and control messages from the smart meter. We propose three different authentication mechanisms for devices in the HAN: 1) between the gateway and the smart meter, 2) between the smart appliances and the HAN, and 3) between the transient devices and the HAN. We show that the adversarial behavior during the authentication of devices such as the man-in-the-middle and impersonation attacks are prevented using the proposed device authentication mechanisms by extensive use of collaboration between different parties. Eventually, we provide secure and intuitive device authentication mechanisms (that require minimum or no user effort) for various parts of the HAN with low computation and communication overheads.