Biblio

The smart grid aims to improve the efficiency, reliability and safety of the electric system via modern communication system, it's necessary to utilize cloud computing to process and store the data. In fact, it's a promising paradigm to integrate smart grid into cloud computing. However, access to cloud computing system also brings data security issues. This paper focuses on the protection of user privacy in smart meter system based on data combination privacy and trusted third party. The paper demonstrates the security issues for smart grid communication system and cloud computing respectively, and illustrates the security issues for the integration. And we introduce data chunk storage and chunk relationship confusion to protect user privacy. We also propose a chunk information list system for inserting and searching data.

Despite the benefits offered by smart grids, energy producers, distributors and consumers are increasingly concerned about possible security and privacy threats. These threats typically manifest themselves at runtime as new usage scenarios arise and vulnerabilities are discovered. Adaptive security and privacy promise to address these threats by increasing awareness and automating prevention, detection and recovery from security and privacy requirements' failures at runtime by re-configuring system controls and perhaps even changing requirements. This paper discusses the need for adaptive security and privacy in smart grids by presenting some motivating scenarios. We then outline some research issues that arise in engineering adaptive security. We particularly scrutinize published reports by NIST on smart grid security and privacy as the basis for our discussions.

A major challenge for utilities is energy theft, wherein malicious actors steal energy for financial gain. One such form of theft in the smart grid is the fraudulent amplification of energy generation measurements from DERs, such as photo-voltaics. It is important to detect this form of malicious activity, but in a way that ensures the privacy of customers. Not considering privacy aspects could result in a backlash from customers and a heavily curtailed deployment of services, for example. In this short paper, we present a novel privacy-preserving approach to the detection of manipulated DER generation measurements.

It can get the user's privacy and home energy use information by analyzing the user's electrical load information in smart grid, and this is an area of concern. A rechargeable battery may be used in the home network to protect user's privacy. In this paper, the battery can neither charge nor discharge, and the power of battery is adjustable, at the same time, we model the real user's electrical load information and the battery power information and the recorded electrical power of smart meters which are processed with discrete way. Then we put forward a heuristic algorithm which can make the rate of information leakage less than existing solutions. We use statistical methods to protect user's privacy, the theoretical analysis and the examples show that our solution makes the scene design more reasonable and is more effective than existing solutions to avoid the leakage of the privacy.

Privacy has become a critical topic in the engineering of electric systems. This work proposes an approach for smart-grid-specific privacy requirements engineering by extending previous general privacy requirements engineering frameworks. The proposed extension goes one step further by focusing on privacy in the smart grid. An alignment of smart grid privacy requirements, dependability issues and privacy requirements engineering methods is presented. Starting from this alignment a Threat Tree Analysis is performed to obtain a first set of generic, high level privacy requirements. This set is formulated mostly on the data instead of the information level and provides the basis for further project-specific refinement.

The smart grid changes the way energy is produced and distributed. In addition both, energy and information is exchanged bidirectionally among participating parties. Therefore heterogeneous systems have to cooperate effectively in order to achieve a common high-level use case, such as smart metering for billing or demand response for load curtailment. Furthermore, a substantial amount of personal data is often needed for achieving that goal. Capturing and processing personal data in the smart grid increases customer concerns about privacy and in addition, certain statutory and operational requirements regarding privacy aware data processing and storage have to be met. An increase of privacy constraints, however, often limits the operational capabilities of the system. In this paper, we present an approach that automates the process of finding an optimal balance between privacy requirements and operational requirements in a smart grid use case and application scenario. This is achieved by formally describing use cases in an abstract model and by finding an algorithm that determines the optimum balance by forward mapping privacy and operational impacts. For this optimal balancing algorithm both, a numeric approximation and - if feasible - an analytic assessment are presented and investigated. The system is evaluated by applying the tool to a real-world use case from the University of Southern California (USC) microgrid.

Processing smart grid data for analytics purposes brings about a series of privacy-related risks. In order to allow for the most suitable mitigation strategies, reasonable privacy risks need to be addressed by taking into consideration the perspective of each smart grid stakeholder separately. In this context, we use the notion of privacy concerns to reflect potential privacy risks from the perspective of different smart grid stakeholders. Privacy concerns help to derive privacy goals, which we represent using the goals structuring notation. Thus represented goals can more comprehensibly be addressed through technical and non-technical strategies and solutions. The thread of argumentation - from concerns to goals to strategies and solutions - is presented in form of a privacy case, which is analogous to the safety case used in the automotive domain. We provide an exemplar privacy case for the smart grid developed as part of the Aspern Smart City Research project.

This paper proposes a lightweight and privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme for dynamic electricity pricing based billing in smart grids using the concept of single-pass authenticated encryption (AE). Unlike existing literature that only considers static pricing, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to address privacy under dynamic pricing.

Protecting energy consumers's data and privacy is a key factor for the further adoption and diffusion of smart grid technologies and applications. However, current smart grid initiatives and implementations around the globe tend to either focus on the need for technical security to the detriment of privacy or consider privacy as a feature to add after system design. This paper aims to contribute towards filling the gap between this fact and the accepted wisdom that privacy concerns should be addressed as early as possible (preferably when modeling system's requirements). We present a methodological framework for tackling privacy concerns throughout all phases of the smart grid system development process. We describe methods and guiding principles to help smart grid engineers to elicit and analyze privacy threats and requirements from the outset of the system development, and derive the best suitable countermeasures, i.e. privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), accordingly. The paper also provides a summary of modern PETs, and discusses their context of use and contributions with respect to the underlying privacy engineering challenges and the smart grid setting being considered.

A successful Smart Grid system requires purpose-built security architecture which is explicitly designed to protect customer data confidentiality. In addition to the investment on electric power infrastructure for protecting the privacy of Smart Grid-related data, entities need to actively participate in the NIST interoperability framework process; establish policies and oversight structure for the enforcement of cyber security controls of the data through adoption of security best practices, personnel training, cyber vulnerability assessments, and consumer privacy audits.

Cascading failure, which can be triggered by both physical and cyber attacks, is among the most critical threats to the security and resilience of power grids. In current literature, researchers investigate the issue of cascading failure on smart grids mainly from the attacker's perspective. From the perspective of a grid defender or operator, however, it is also an important issue to restore the smart grid suffering from cascading failure back to normal operation as soon as possible. In this paper, we consider cascading failure in conjunction with the restoration process involving repairing of the failed nodes/links in a sequential fashion. Based on a realistic power flow cascading failure model, we exploit a Q-learning approach to develop a practical and effective policy to identify the optimal way of sequential restorations for large-scale smart grids. Simulation results on three power grid test benchmarks demonstrate the learning ability and the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Two-factor authentication has been widely used due to the vulnerabilities associated with the traditional password-based authentication. One-Time Password (OTP) plays an important role in authentication protocol. However, a variety of security problems have been challenging the security of OTP, and improvements are introduced to solve it. This paper reviews several schemes to implement and modify the OTP, a comparison among the popular OTP algorithms is presented. A smart grid architecture with edge computing is shown. The authentication techniques in the smart grid are analyzed.

The United States and European Union have an increasing number of projects that are engaging end-use devices for improved grid capabilities. Areas such as building-to-grid and vehicle-to-grid are simple examples of these advanced capabilities. In this paper, we present an innovative concept study for a ship-to-grid integration. The goal of this study is to simulate a two-way power flow between ship(s) and the grid with GridLAB-D for the port of Kyllini in Greece, where a ship-to-shore interconnection was recently implemented. Extending this further, we explore: (a) the ability of ships to meet their load demand needs, while at berth, by being supplied with energy from the electric grid and thus powering off their diesel engines; and (b) the ability of ships to provide power to critical loads onshore. As a result, the ship-to-grid integration helps (a) mitigate environmental pollutants from the ships' diesel engines and (b) provide resilience to nearby communities during a power disruption due to natural disasters or man-made threats.

Software-defined networking (SDN) allows the smart grid to be centrally controlled and managed by decoupling the control plane from the data plane, but it also expands attack surface for attackers. Existing studies about the security of SDN-enabled smart grid (SDSG) mainly focused on static methods such as access control and identity authentication, which is vulnerable to attackers that carefully probe the system. As the attacks become more variable and complex, there is an urgent need for dynamic defense methods. In this paper, we propose a security function virtualization (SFV) based moving target defense of SDSG which makes the attack surface constantly changing. First, we design a dynamic defense mechanism by migrating virtual security function (VSF) instances as the traffic state changes. The centralized SDN controller is re-designed for global status monitoring and migration management. Moreover, we formalize the VSF instances migration problem as an integer nonlinear programming problem with multiple constraints and design a pre-migration algorithm to prevent VSF instances' resources from being exhausted. Simulation results indicate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

This work describes the self-healing systems and their benefits in the power distribution networks, with the objective of indicating which manual switch should become, as a matter of priority, automatic. The computational tool used is based on graph theory, genetic algorithms and multicriteria evaluation. There are benefits for consumers, that will benefit from a more reliable and stable system, and for the utility, that can reduce costs with team field and financial compensations payed to consumers in case of continuity indexes violation. Data from a real distribution network from the state of Sao Paulo will be used as a case study for the application of the methodology.

Smart Grid (SG) is regarded as complex electrical power system due to massive penetration of Renewable Energy Resources and Distribution Generations. The implementation of adjustable speed drives, advance power electronic devices, and electric arc furnaces are incorporated in SG (the transition from conventional power system). Moreover, SG is an advance, automated, controlled, efficient, digital, and intelligent system that ensures pertinent benefits, such as: (a) consumer empowerment, (b) advanced communication infrastructure, (c) user-friendly system, and (d) supports bi-directional power flow. Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is key tool for SG deployment and provides key solutions to a vast array of complex SG challenges. This research provides a comprehensive study on DSP interactions within SG. The prominent challenges posed by conventional grid, such as: (a) monitoring and control, (b) Electric Vehicles infrastructure, (c) cyber data injection attack, (d) Demand Response management and (e) cyber data injection attack are thoroughly investigated in this research.

Wireless networks offer great flexibility and ease of deployment for the rapid implementation of smart grids. However, these data network technologies are prone to security issues. Especially, the risk of eavesdropping attacks increases due to the inherent characteristics of the wireless medium. In this context, physical layer security can augment secrecy through appropriate coding and signal processing. In this paper we consider the use of faster-than-Nyquist signaling to introduce artificial noise in the wireless network segment of the smart grid; with the aim of reinforce the information security at the physical layer. The results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improves the secrecy rate of the channel. Guaranteeing, in coexistence with other security mechanisms and despite the presence of potential eavesdroppers, a reliable and secure flow of information for smart grids.

The virtual world does not observe national borders, has no uniform legal system, and does not have a common perception of security and privacy issues. It is however, relatively homogenous in terms of technology.A cyberattack on an energy delivery system can have significant impacts on the availability of a system to perform critical functions as well as the integrity of the system and the confidentiality of sensitive information.

Smart Grids require extensive communication to enable safe and stable energy supply in the age of decentralized and dynamic energy production and consumption. To protect the communication in this critical infrastructure, public authorities mandate smart meter gateways (SMGWs) to be in control of the communication security. To this end, the SMGW intercepts all inbound and outbound communication of its premise, e.g., a factory or smart home, and forwards it on secure channels that the SMGW established itself. However, using the SMGW as proxy, local devices can neither review the security of these remote connections established by the SMGW nor enforce higher security guarantees than established by the all in one configuration of the SMGW which does not allow for use case-specific security settings. We present mechanisms that enable local devices to regain this insight and control over the full connection, i.e., up to the final receiver, while retaining the SMGW's ability to ensure a suitable security level. Our evaluation shows modest computation and transmission overheads for this increased security in the critical smart grid infrastructure.

As a national strategic hot spot, the Internet of Things (IoT) has shown its vigor and vitality. With the development of IoT, its application in power grid is more and more extensive. As an advanced technology for information sensing and transmission, IoT has been applied extensively in power generation, transmission, transformation, distribution, utilization and other processes, and will develop with broad prospect in smart grid. Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is of broad application prospects in production management, life-cycle asset management and smart power utilization of smart grid. Its characteristics and security demands of application domain present a challenge for the security of electric power business. However, current protocols either need dual authentication and key agreements, or have poor compatibility with current network architecture. In order to improve the high security of power network data transmission, an end-to-end security authentication protocol of NB-IoT for smart grid based on physical unclonable function and state secret algorithm SM3 is proposed in this paper. A self-controllable NB-IoT application layer security architecture was designed by introducing the domestic cryptographic algorithm, extending the existing key derivation structure of LTE, and combining the physical unclonable function to ensure the generation of encryption keys between NB-IoT terminals and power grid business platforms. The protocol of this paper realizes secure data transmission and bidirectional identity authentication between IoT devices and terminals. It is of low communication costs, lightweight and flexible key update. In addition, the protocol also supports terminal authentication during key agreement, which furtherly enhances the security of business systems in smart grid.

As the next generation of the power system, smart grid develops towards automated and intellectualized. Along with the benefits brought by smart grids, e.g., improved energy conversion rate, power utilization rate, and power supply quality, are the security challenges. One of the most important issues in smart grids is to ensure reliable communication between the secondary equipment. The state-of-art method to ensure smart grid security is to detect cyber attacks by deep learning. However, due to the small number of negative samples, the performance of the detection system is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that utilizes the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate abundant negative samples, which helps to improve the performance of the state-of-art detection system. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the performance of the detection system by 4%.

Security and consistency of smart grids is one of the main issues in the design and maintenance of highly controlled and monitored new power grids. Bad data injection attack could lead to disasters such as power system outage, or huge economical losses. In many attack scenarios, the attacker can come up with new attack strategies that couldn't be detected by the traditional bad data detection methods. Adaptive Partitioning State Estimation (APSE) method [3] has been proposed recently to combat such attacks. In this work, we evaluate and compare with a traditional method. The main idea of APSE is to increase the sensitivity of the chi-square test by partitioning the large grids into small ones and apply the test on each partition individually and repeat this procedure until the faulty node is located. Our simulation findings using MATPOWER program show that the method is not consistent where it is sensitive the systems size and the location of faulty nodes as well.

The technological development of the energy sector also produced complex data. In this study, the relationship between smart grid and big data approaches have been investigated. After analyzing which areas of the smart grid system use big data technologies and technologies, big data technologies for detecting smart grid attacks have received attention. Big data analytics can produce efficient solutions and it is especially important to choose which algorithms and metrics to use. For this reason, an application prototype has been proposed that uses a big data method to detect attacks on the smart grid. The algorithm with high accuracy was determined to be 92% for random forests and 87% for decision trees.

Traditional power grid security schemes are being replaced by highly advanced and efficient smart security schemes due to the advancement in grid structure and inclusion of cyber control and monitoring tools. Smart attackers create physical, cyber, or cyber-physical attacks to gain the access of the power system and manipulate/override system status, measurements and commands. In this paper, we formulate the environment for the attacker-defender interaction in the smart power grid. We provide a strategic analysis of the attacker-defender strategic interaction using a game theoretic approach. We apply repeated game to formulate the problem, implement it in the power system, and investigate for optimal strategic behavior in terms of mixed strategies of the players. In order to define the utility or cost function for the game payoffs calculation, generation power is used. Attack-defense budget is also incorporated with the attacker-defender repeated game to reflect a more realistic scenario. The proposed game model is validated using IEEE 39 bus benchmark system. A comparison between the proposed game model and the all monitoring model is provided to validate the observations.

Cyber security has been a top concern for electric power companies deploying smart meters and smart grid technology. Despite the well-known advantages of smart grid technology and the smart meters, it is not yet very clear how and to what extent, the Cyber attacks can hamper the operation of the smart meters, and remote data collections regarding the power usage from the customer sites. To understand these questions, we conducted experiments in a controlled lab environment of our cyber security lab to test a commercial grade smart meter. In this paper, we present results of our investigation for a commercial grade smart meter and measure the operation integrity of the smart meter under cyber-attack conditions.