Smart Grid Advanced Metering Infrastructure: Overview of Cloud-Based Cyber Security Solutions

Abstract

The vision of making the traditional power grid smart has necessitated the incorporation of so many intelligent and smart technologies driven by ICT into virtually all domains of the smart grid. Expectedly, this has opened a lot of routes for vulnerabilities which can be maliciously exploited by today’s cyber criminals. The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is believed to be the foundation of the smart grid. Malicious exploitations of security vulnerabilities present in the smart grid AMI by cyber criminals would be detrimental to both energy providers and final consumers. This is in view of the huge task involved in the management and storage of data from the numerous intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) that traverse the smart grid’s AMI and beyond. A lack of capability in terms of processing, computations and storage of these data can only compound the cyber security problems facing the SG AMI. Cloud Computing is therefore a potential technology that can address the above challenging issues. Previous review works had concentrated mainly on the potentials of cloud computing for the smart grid. None of such works to the best of our knowledge had an extensive focus on the security of the SG AMI. We therefore provide in this paper firstly, a review of the cloud based solutions for the smart grid with appropriate SG domain classification in order to determine the focus points of previous related works. We then provide an elaborate overview on cloud based security solutions for the SG AMI. At the end, future research challenges were highlighted with open research ideas that could help to address the challenges also suggested.