Cyber Security for Smart Grid Communications

An increasing demand for reliable energy supply and numerous technological advancements have motivated the development of smart grids. As the world’s largest engineered system, the smart grid will expand the current capabilities of the electric grid’s generation, transmission, and distribution systems to provide an infrastructure capable of handling future requirements for distributed generation, renewable energy sources, electric vehicles, and the demand-side management of electricity. A smart grid is composed of power infrastructure and communication infrastructure. The power infrastructure generates and distributes electricity to consumers. The communication infrastructure controls the power infrastructure and enables intelligent operation of the power grid. The success of the smart grid rests on a communication infrastructure that is secure, reliable, and cost effective. Although deploying the smart grid has enormous social and technical benefits, several security and privacy concerns arise. The interconnection nature of the smart grid partially explains its success, since the network can be easily accessible by many people at different places. The reverse side of the coin of this success is the great weakness of the smart grid facing malicious attacks. Increasingly interconnected smart grids will unavoidably provide external access, which in turn can lead to compromise and infection of components. Compared to current electrical grids, a new feature of smart grids is that more and more service providers will be involved that can monitor and manage the energy usage for their subscribed consumers by the existing communication network [1]. Service providers are needed because it is highly unlikely that consumers, even if they could understand their cost of energy or environmental impact, will be able to effectively manage their energy usage as it involves too many variables that may change frequently and requires specialized tools. For example, with the help of service providers, consumers react to price signals to achieve active load management [2]. However, the existence of service providers raises new questions about smart grid security. First, since customers (e.g., electric utilities and consumers) work closely with service providers to manage their energy usage, they need to share more information about how they use energy and thus expose themselves to privacy invasions. Second, the involvement of service providers adds significant complexity to the infrastructure, which in turn introduces numerous opportunities for attack exploitation. From the perspective of the defender, more complex systems require dramatically more effort to analyze and defend, because of the state-space explosion when considering combinations of events. The cyber security of the smart grid should not be compromised by service providers when they deliver existing or emerging services. In the remainder of this article, we first introduce the structure of the smart grid, as well as general security threats it will have to face and the corresponding solutions. After giving an overview of secure service provision in the smart grid, we present two new and important security challenges due to the addition of service providers. The first is to establish a secure communication procedure among the electric utility, consumers, and service providers. The second is ABSTRACT