Securing RDS broadcast messages for smart grid applications

Abstract

Efforts to reduce peak electrical demand has led to the introduction of demand response programs for residences. Demand response programs allow customers to reduce or shift their electrical consumption from peak periods in response to dynamic prices of electricity. Utility companies broadcasts the prices to the customers who then respond by reducing consumption during peak periods or shift the consumption to off-peak periods. Similarly, direct load control programs entice consumers with special rates or other incentives for allowing the utility to control load (typically air conditioning) for a number of days per year. Both uses require a ubiqituous and cost-effective communication network to allow utilities to communicate with users and appliances. The Radio Data System (RDS) has been identified as one strong candidate technology. However, security concerns arise due to the wireless nature of the communication channel. Source authentication is crucial in demand response to ensure that only authenticated messages are responded to.This report presents evaluations of cryptographic methods that could be employed to offer source authentication over the RDS network. Simulations are used to determine the impact on the network performance by employing digital signatures to allow source authentication. The simulations were calibrated with data collected in Ottawa, Canada, in particular to model signal propagation characteristics. While different environments experience different path losses, the relative comparisons are not impacted by this difference, however. The authentication schemes studied all provide strong authentication against attackers who attempt to forge signatures without knowledge of private keys (which are held at the transmitter). The information exposed in the transmitted messages will not help an attacker in forging future messages. And as messages are time-sensitive and the senders and receivers in the network coarsely time-synchronized, replay-attacks are prevented as well. This is different from shared-key/secret-key schemes such as the one employed in Zigbee, where exposure of the secret key on the receiver side (using bit sniffing or other techniques to access the non-volatile memory on the receiver) compromises the security/authentication of messages.The report presents comparisons of the security offered by the protocols, the bandwidth overhead, computational costs and message reception probability. Our simulation results show that, up to a distance of 90 km, all authentication schemes do not affect message reception by the receivers. Beyond that, all the schemes have an effect on message reception due to increased message sizes and receiver bootstrapping for BiBa and HORSE. ECDSA and HORSE outperform BiBa in terms of message reception beyond 90 km and the difference between the two is not significant. ECDSA however offers higher security than HORSE and BiBa but at the cost of increased computational complexity, in particular at the receivers. In addition, ECDSA has the highest bandwidt...

A Secure and Scalable Data Communication Scheme in Smart Grids

“…A significant amount of research has been carried out to protect the smart grid systems. Multicast authentication schemes such as TELSA, Biba, HORS, and OTS [3,23] were proposed for authenticating entities such as utility companies and control centers when messages or control commands are sent to smart meters. To authenticate smart meters or other smart devices to the control center, batch verification schemes [24][25][26][27] were developed to improve the efficiency.…”

A Lightweight Message Authentication Scheme for Smart Grid Communications

“…Three methods are compared in [14] for authenticating demand response messages in SG, namely Bins and Balls (BiBa), Hash to Obtain Random Subsets Extension (HORSE), and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). It is demonstrated that ECDSA offers higher security in contrast with BiBa and HORSE, at the expense of increased computational complexity, particularly at the receiver end.…”

“…We compare the performance of our proposed authentication scheme with ECDSA. The reason for considering ECDSA is that it is demonstrated to be a secure authentication protocol for SG demand response communications in [14]. In our simulations, we employed AES-128 algorithm to encrypt the packets to be transmitted using the shared session key, , generated during the proposed authentication mechanism.…”

An early warning system against malicious activities for smart grid communications

“…The BAN GW responds to their authentication requests. The authentication process is simulated with the ECDSA signature verification scheme, which has been already proposed in existing literature as an authentication scheme for SG communication [13]. Thus, the malicious smart meters attempt to consume the rather constrained memory resources available at the BAN GW in order to deny legitimate authentication requests from the uninfected HAN GWs.…”