Identity and Access Management for IoT in Smart Grid

Abstract

A smart grid (SG) is a complex system that comprises distributed servers and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. IoT devices are resource-constrained and are unable to cope with traditional communication and security protocols. In light of this limitation, this work proposes a novel method for end-to-end secure communication between the elements in the SG. Our proposal enables an authenticated user to transport her Internet credentials to the IoT context. We provide high efficiency in the message exchanges by adopting multicast communication without compromising the SG security. However, even though this process provides secure communication, it cannot enforce fine-grained access control over protected resources. Therefore, we propose a new two-step lightweight access control mechanism that leverages the established configuration to provide role-based authorization in the IoT context. The prototype evaluation shows that our proposal is more flexible, demanding less manual configuration, while also requires only 23% of message exchanges compared to other approaches in the literature.