Secure Self-healing Group Key Distribution Scheme with Constant Storage for SCADA Systems in Smart Grid

Abstract

Smart grid has a great advantage over the traditional power grid and it is a critical condition in people’s daily life. The security of data communication in smart grid is important and needs to be efficiently guaranteed. The supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems is in charge of supervising the sensitive process. In SCADA systems, the secure communication between control center and remote terminal units can be achieved by the key distribution mechanism. However, the remote terminal units are resource-constrained and sometimes are not available so that they cannot receive the session key updating broadcast. Self-healing is an efficient mechanism to calculate missing session keys by using later broadcast messages. In this paper, we propose an efficient self-healing group key distribution scheme for SCADA systems. The security analysis illustrates that our scheme satisfy the basic security properties defined in security model. According to the performance evaluation from storage and communication cost viewpoints, the proposed scheme is efficient.