Hardware Security for Device Authentication in the Smart Grid

Secure communication between devices is a key aspect of smart grid security. In the future smart home environment, various smart devices, appliances and energy management systems will communicate with each other via the home network. In order to achieve mutual authentication, each device will have a private cryptographic key which must be protected against theft or misuse. Current mechanisms for protecting such keys exist but generally require interaction with the user. This makes them unsuitable for the smart grid context due to the high degree of automation involved in the smart grid. To address this challenge, we have designed, implemented and tested a system that provides hardware security for device private keys using Trusted Computing technologies. Using DRTM late-launch functionality, our system ensures that the private key is only available within a protected trusted environment on a specific device. Preliminary implementation and testing has demonstrated that our system can operate successfully in unattended environments such as the smart grid.