Cyber security challenges for IoT-based smart grid networks

Prosumer concept and digitilization offer the exciting potential of microgrid transactive energy systems at distribution level for reducing transmission losses, decreasing electric infrastructure expenditure, improving reliability, enhancing local energy use, and minimizing customers' electricity bills. Distributed energy resources, demand response, distributed ledger technologies, and local energy markets are integral parts of transaction energy system for emergence of decentralized smart grid system. Hence, this paper discusses transactive energy concept and proposes seven functional layers architecture for designing transactive energy system. The proposed architecture is compared with practical case study of Brooklyn microgrid. Moreover, this paper reviews the existing architectures and explains the widely known distributed ledger technologies (blockchain, directed acyclic graph, hashgraph, holochain, and tempo) alongwith their advantages and challenges. The local energy market concept is presented and critically analyzed for energy trade within a transactive energy system. This paper also reviews the potential and challenges of peer-to-peer and community-based energy markets. Proposed architecture and analytical review of distributed ledger technologies and local energy markets pave the way for advanced research and industrialization of transactive energy systems.

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Microgrid Transactive Energy: Review, Architectures, Distributed Ledger Technologies, and Market Analysis

Smart grid (SG) networks are newly upgraded networks of connected objects that greatly improve reliability, efficiency, and sustainability of the traditional energy infrastructure. In this respect, the smart metering infrastructure (SMI) plays an important role in controlling, monitoring, and managing multiple domains in the SG. Despite the salient features of SMI, security, and privacy issues have been under debate because of the large number of heterogeneous devices that are anticipated to be coordinated through public communication networks. This survey paper shows a brief overview of real cyber attack incidents in traditional energy networks and those targeting the smart metering network. Specifically, we present a threat taxonomy considering: 1) threats in system-level security; 2) threats and/or theft of services; and 3) threats to privacy. Based on the presented threats, we derive a set of security and privacy requirements for SG metering networks. Furthermore, we discuss various schemes that have been proposed to address these threats, considering the pros and cons of each. Finally, we investigate the open research issues to shed new light on future research directions in SG metering networks.

/pdf/smart-grid-metering-networks-a-survey-on-security-privacy-ewxtsbvnrk.pdf

Smart Grid Metering Networks: A Survey on Security, Privacy and Open Research Issues

We present a peptide library and data resource of >100,000 synthetic, unmodified peptides and their phosphorylated counterparts with known sequences and phosphorylation sites. Analysis of the library by mass spectrometry yielded a data set that we used to evaluate the merits of different search engines (Mascot and Andromeda) and fragmentation methods (beam-type collision-induced dissociation (HCD) and electron transfer dissociation (ETD)) for peptide identification. We also compared the sensitivities and accuracies of phosphorylation-site localization tools (Mascot Delta Score, PTM score and phosphoRS), and we characterized the chromatographic behavior of peptides in the library. We found that HCD identified more peptides and phosphopeptides than did ETD, that phosphopeptides generally eluted later from reversed-phase columns and were easier to identify than unmodified peptides and that current computational tools for proteomics can still be substantially improved. These peptides and spectra will facilitate the development, evaluation and improvement of experimental and computational proteomic strategies, such as separation techniques and the prediction of retention times and fragmentation patterns.

A large synthetic peptide and phosphopeptide reference library for mass spectrometry–based proteomics

The applications of compressive sensing (CS) in the field of information security have captured a great deal of researchers’ attention in the past decade. To supply guidance for researchers from a comprehensive perspective, this paper, for the first time, reviews CS in information security field from two aspects: theoretical security and application security. Moreover, the CS applied in image cipher is one of the most widespread applications, as its characteristics of dimensional reduction and random projection can be utilized and integrated into image cryptosystems, which can achieve simultaneous compression and encryption of an image or multiple images. With respect to this application, the basic framework designs and the corresponding analyses are investigated. Specifically, the investigation proceeds from three aspects, namely, image ciphers based on chaos and CS, image ciphers based on optics and CS, and image ciphers based on chaos, optics, and CS. A total of six frameworks are put forward. Meanwhile, their analyses in terms of security, advantages, disadvantages, and so on are presented. At last, we attempt to indicate some other possible application research topics in future.

https://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/DU:30106242/zhang-reviewofcompressive-2016.pdf

A Review of Compressive Sensing in Information Security Field

A novel two-phase robust content-based image authentication scheme is introduced. The proposed scheme is constructed based on a combination of hard and soft authentication using two existing generic approximate message authentication codes (AMACs). The AMACs combine error- correcting codes with cryptographic primitives such as message authentication codes and symmetric encryption algorithms. The message authentication codes are used for hard authentication, whereas the error-correcting codes introduce a certain degree of robustness in authentication. This is achieved by correcting minor unintentional modifications as a result of common image processing operations such as quantization , compression , and noise addition. The two-phase image authentication scheme verifies the authenticity of an image in two phases. The low frequency elements of the image in a transform domain are subjected to the first phase while some higher frequency elements are left to the second phase if the first phase succeeds. The proposed scheme tolerates common content- preserving modifications in an image but can discriminate intentional modifications affecting the image content. Mathematical bounds for the accuracy and the security level of the proposed approach are estimated and the performance is compared with some other well-known schemes in the literature. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme shows high discriminating capability and can detect different types of meaningful forgery attacks on images while preserving the robustness. It also outperforms the benchmark image authentication schemes in terms of tradeoff between robustness and fragility.

Secure and Robust Two-Phase Image Authentication

This paper presents an approach to integrate decryption into the decoding process, and also gives an example to prove its advantages. The general idea considers the decryptor as a decoding component and not as an isolated unit in the decoding path between the channel and the source decoder. A decryptor produces useless output, if only one bit of its input, compared to the output of the encryptor, is modified. Therefore, it is important to improve the capability to correct input errors by the decryptor in case the channel decoder does not deliver correct bits. The presented solution supports the decryptor with soft output of the channel decoder. As far as known today, soft output has never been used by cryptographic mechanisms before. The example of a decryptor, which provides data origin authentication, proves that after decryption the error rate can drastically be reduced by using soft output from a Convolutional or Turbo Decoder as soft input to the decryptor. Results are given for digital signature verification based on elliptic curve cryptography transmitted over channels with a wide range of Signal-to-Noise Ratios.

Soft Input Decryption

This paper addresses the perfect secrecy analysis of the scenario for encryption via compressed sensing. In this system the measurement matrix is generated based on a secret seed and is considered as a shared secret key between sender and receiver. The knowledge of signal sparsity and shared secret key enables receiver to recover the original submitted signal. It was shown that the Shannon-sense perfect secrecy is not achievable in general in such an algorithm. Although, in this paper it is proven that a weaker sense perfect secrecy may be achieved under some assumptions. The mutual information between source and encrypted message sets is estimated to analyze the perfect secrecy problem in general for unknown statistical distribution over source message set. The numerical evidence is given to support theoretical results.

Security analysis of the joint encryption and compressed sensing

Intelligent buildings are difficult to imagine nowadays without smart metering devices. Smart metering provides commodity consumption information on electricity, gas and water. This information is also made available to the customers in order to help them in the reduction of energy consumption, costs and CO2 emission. Energy consumption can be adapted dynamically using smart metering devices to balance the power generation and distribution in the smart grid. Evolution of smart metering systems is reviewed in this paper. Smart metering projects completed in Europe are listed together with their aims and objectives. Security issues in smart metering systems are highlighted in the paper. Finally, some of the communication protocols and standards for smart metering devices are discussed in the paper.

Evolution of smart metering systems

Intelligent buildings are not imaginable anymore without smart metering devices. Smart metering systems are used not only for the provisioning of instantaneous metering information on commodities, such as electricity, water and gas, to the service providers but also to make this information available to customers. This helps the customers in dynamically adapting their energy consumption behavior. The smart metering devices also help in balancing the power generation and distribution in a smart grid by tailoring the power generation according to the demand. However, the liberalization of the metering market requires few strong security and privacy requirements for the metering data. Smart metering raises many security and privacy concerns. There are worries that the personal information of consumers could be disclosed. There are also concerns about frauds exploiting security vulnerabilities in smart metering systems on a large scale, e.g., making smart meters provide false metering data to the service providers. From a macro perspective, the smart grids, including the smart metering systems and devices can be attacked to bring down the whole grid or at least some parts of the grid, which is a concern of national security. This paper focuses on the security and privacy aspects of the smart metering systems. Potential attackers, security threats and attacks on smart metering systems are listed and the security approaches to address the security issues are presented. A security by design approach for secure smart metering is discussed in the paper. The major results of a security by design approach for smart metering systems developed in the project, entitled “Trusted Computing Engineering for Resource Constraint Embedded Systems Applications”, funded by the European commission, are summarized in the end.

Natasa Zivic

Papers

Secure and Robust Two-Phase Image Authentication

Soft Input Decryption

Security analysis of the joint encryption and compressed sensing

Evolution of smart metering systems

Security issues in smart metering systems