Visible to the public Hardware-Based Randomized Encoding for Sensor Authentication in Power Grid SCADA Systems

TitleHardware-Based Randomized Encoding for Sensor Authentication in Power Grid SCADA Systems
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsHutto, Kevin, Grijalva, Santiago, Mooney, Vincent
Conference Name2022 IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference (TPEC)
Keywordsauthentication, compositionality, False Data Injection, Hardware, hardware security, integrated circuits, power grid, power grids, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, SCADA systems, SCADA Systems Security, Sensor systems, Software
AbstractSupervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are utilized extensively in critical power grid infrastructures. Modern SCADA systems have been proven to be susceptible to cyber-security attacks and require improved security primitives in order to prevent unwanted influence from an adversarial party. One section of weakness in the SCADA system is the integrity of field level sensors providing essential data for control decisions at a master station. In this paper we propose a lightweight hardware scheme providing inferred authentication for SCADA sensors by combining an analog to digital converter and a permutation generator as a single integrated circuit. Through this method we encode critical sensor data at the time of sensing, so that unencoded data is never stored in memory, increasing the difficulty of software attacks. We show through experimentation how our design stops both software and hardware false data injection attacks occurring at the field level of SCADA systems.
DOI10.1109/TPEC54980.2022.9750706
Citation Keyhutto_hardware-based_2022