Development in the field of electronics and communication set up new paradigm. The need of making the grid smart is increasing due to environmental constrain and effective use of the available electricity. The use of digital information and controls technology to improve reliability, security, and efficiency of the electric grid.

Smart grid

Blockchain is an immutable type of distributed ledger that is capable of storing data without relying on a third party. Blockchain technology has attracted significant interest in research areas, including its application in the smart grid for cybersecurity. Although significant efforts have been devoted to utilizing blockchain in the smart grid for cybersecurity, there is a lack of comprehensive survey on blockchain in the smart grid for cybersecurity in both application and technological perspectives. To fill this gap, we conducted a comprehensive survey on blockchain for smart gird cybersecurity. This conducted survey presents the latest insights of ideas, architectures, and techniques of implementation that are relevant to blockchain's application in the smart grid for cybersecurity. This article aims at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts specific to blockchain for cybersecurity in the smart grid.

Blockchain for Cybersecurity in Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey

Software defined networking (SDN) is the next‐generation network. SDN enhances the programming flexibility, speed and automation to improve the network's performance. In recent times SDN has played a vital role in networking technology. It communicates with underlying hardware infrastructure and directs traffic on a network. The most complicated issue in SDN is the control plane's single point of failure (SPF). The main reason for raising the SPF problem in SDN by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The network collapses during failures in SDN, and the control plane is considered a management controller. Therefore, a novel intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) is proposed in the proposed approach to address SDN's problems mentioned above. In the proposed approach, a long short term memory (LSTM) and graded rated unit (GRU) deep learning model is proposed as the “Block‐Attack” model. The main objective of using LSTM and GRU in the proposed approach is to enhance the rate of accuracy in detecting DDoS attacks in an SDN environment. The CICDDoS2019 dataset is used for experimental result analysis in the proposed approach. Initially, the dataset is fed into the preprocessing stage. Using the K‐medoid technique, raw datasets are preprocessed to reduce the model's sensitivity to low density. In the proposed approach, the support vector machine based machine learning (SVM‐ML) technique is utilized to prevent DDoS attacks in a Mininet‐based emulation. Then, LSTM and GRU deep learning (DL) techniques are used to define the block‐attack model to enhance the detection performance. The experimental results of the proposed approach “Block‐Attack” model attain 98.5% of accuracy to detect and prevent the DDoS attacks and 95.5% of accuracy for SVM based method.

Intelligent software defined networking: Long short term memory‐graded rated unit enabled block‐attack model to tackle distributed denial of service attacks

A detailed survey of denial of service for IoT and multimedia systems: Past, present and futuristic development

Today, an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare devices, crucial to a person's wellbeing and life, connects to the internet and consequently is exposed to a variety of threats. These devices possess low computational resources, and as a result they cannot use security tools such as antivirus or firewalls. Consequently, they become easy targets for cyber-attacks and malware infection, thus putting a person's life at risk. One way to protect these devices from malware infection is Remote Attestation (RA), a process by which a device with low computational power (prover) verifies its internal state to a party with higher computational resources (verifier) upon the latter's request. However, in case the verifier is malicious, it may constantly send numerous requests for RA to a prover to prevent it from performing the functions it was designed for. Thus, keeping it busy and rendering it unusable to its legit users as well as services. In short, the verifier performs a Computational Denial of Service (CDoS) attack against the prover. This paper proposes the BARRETT architecture which uses a Public Ethereum Network (PEN) in conjunction with an RA protocol to protect the prover from CDoS attacks. In particular, the PEN in BARRETT deters CDoS by forcing the verifier to pay a fee in Ether cryptocurrency every time they wish to send an Attestation Request (AR) to a prover. The verifier pays the fee since in BARRETT it can send the AR only via Ethereum transactions. Consequently, any attempt to perform a CDoS becomes prohibitively expensive.

BARRETT BlockchAin Regulated REmote aTTestation

With the evolution of smart grid, the operations, planning and maintenance of an electric grid have improved. On the contrary, smart grid totally relies on the computer network so there is a need of complex and efficient network management. Software defined networks (SDN) is a completely new modern architecture that allows the network to be centrally controlled or explicitly programmed using software applications. Traditionally in computer networks, the routing and switching decisions are implemented on a dedicated hardware. This hardware can be a switch or a router. But with the evolution of Software defined networks, the routing and switching function has been separated and is classified in Control and data planes respectively. Generally, in SDN, the control plane is centralized and is responsible to make a decision on what to do with the incoming packet. Once the decision is made, it is saved in the forwarding table of a switch on the data plane. While Software Defined Network (SDN) has its advantages of central management, programmability, agility and vendor neutrality, they carry a high risk of Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS). Centralized nature of the control plane in SDN is a huge risk factor because the attacker may bombard the control plane with malicious packets resulting in a single point of failure of the control plane. If the control plane fails, the entire smart grid network will collapse resulting in a massive outage and financial loss to the stakeholders. In this paper, we have devised a distributed approach, using blockchains, to detect and prevent DDoS attacks on the centralized control plane of SDN. We have simulated our approach using AnyLogic simulator and the results show that the proposed approach is more efficient as compared the existing techniques as it substantially reduces the risk of DDoS attacks and SDN controller overhead.

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Detection and Prevention of DDoS attacks on Software Defined Networks Controllers for Smart Grid

Real time video multicast has always been a topic of active research for almost all types of computer networks. With the shift of focus towards Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), several approaches have been suggested for the creation and maintenance of multicast trees in the dynamic and unpredictable environment of MANETs. This paper presents a simple and novel approach for Multicasting in MANETs that is particularly suited for multicasting live video/audio streams. The approach is lightweight, scalable and is general that it can be made to work with any underlying unicast routing protocol such as AODV, DSDV, and DSR among others. The paper describes the protocol in details including how a node will join or leave a multicast session; how the multicast tree is maintained and how it copes with the mobility of nodes.

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Zohaib Ahmed

Papers

Detection and Prevention of DDoS attacks on Software Defined Networks Controllers for Smart Grid

SLIM - Simple Lightweight and Intuitive Multicast Protocol for MANETs