Context-sensitive Key Management For Smart Grid Telemetric Devices
In smart grid, the scale of pole devices that monitor the health of power line is large. With the upgrade of smart grid, the number of these resource-constrained (in terms of memory and computation) devices is further increasing. These devices are easy targets to security attacks as they are accessible via wireless network, and use weak passwords for authentication and transferring telemetric data to the pole maintenance personnel. General-purpose security protocols are not suitable for providing data security to these devices with limited memory, computational power and network connectivity. Therefore, security in smart grid is still a challenge. In the first part of this thesis, we present a SCalable and Automated PAssword-CHanging protocol, SCAPACH, for unique authentication of human personnel (operator) and secure collection of telemetric data from a large number of measurement devices. SCAPACH employs physical per-operator, per-pole-device information as well as changeable secret salts to generate new unique passwords and secret keys every time a pole device is accessed. In this work, we address the memory and computational constraint problem of measurement devices. Besides, we address the limited change management capability problem of the measurement devices and our protocol works for evolving infrastructure. Our experiments confirm that the password-changing protocol authenticates and transmits measurement device data securely and in real-time under varying maintenance scenarios. In the second part of this thesis, we describe a secure and lightweight scalable security protocol that allows a power system operator to collect data from measurement devices using data collectors. The security protocol trades off between computations and device memory requirements and provides flexible association between data collectors and measurement devices. These features allow data to be securely transferred from measurement devices to power operator via mobile or untrustworthy data collectors. We analyze the complexity and security of the protocol and validate its performance using experiments. Our results confirm that the protocol collects data in a secure, fast and efficient manner.
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