Smart grid hardware security

Abstract

Smart grids are vulnerable to a multitude of attacks, due to their cyber-physical nature. Such attacks can occur at their communication, networking, and physical entry points and can seriously affect the operation of a grid. Thus, the security factor of a smart grid is of an utmost importance. In order to properly secure a smart grid, we should be able to understand its underlying vulnerabilities and associated threats, as well as quantify their effects, and devise appropriate security solutions. In this chapter, we begin with an introduction to smart grids and Hardware Security. Then we continue to describe some grid architecture patterns, so that we can be able to understand a general picture of the grid functionality. In the next section, we discuss the basic and most important aspect of the security of the smart grid; the secure communication between the devices, providing some techniques for a secure device authentication scheme. We, then, discuss the confidentiality of the power usage, explaining various methods for metering data anonymization. In the end, we present solutions related to the integrity of data, software and hardware.