Smart Grid Communication Infrastructures

12Security Schemes for Smart Grid Communications over Public Networks

In this chapter, we focus on security schemes for smart grid communications over public networks that utility companies subscribe to. Public networks in the smart grid are distinguished from private networks by their independence from utilities. Our proposed security schemes can be applied by utilities even without full control of the communications network to add extra protection on top of existing security provided by network service providers.

12.1 Overview of the Proposed Security Schemes

12.1.1 Background and Motivation

With the introduction of cloud computing, some data must be transmitted through public networks (e.g. the Internet) in smart grid communications [181, 189, 190]. Although public cloud service providers have certain security mechanisms within the cloud, data exchange over the Internet still needs extra protection. We propose to apply identity‐based (ID‐based) security schemes [183–185] to secure data transmission over the Internet. With the proposed security schemes, utility companies can have more security control. Moreover, the communication infrastructure in the smart grid can better handle large numbers of participants.

The foundation of an ID‐based security scheme is public‐key cryptography. Instead of generating keys randomly, an ID‐based security scheme utilizes the unique ID of each participant. By doing so, key management might be more convenient, since some of the keys can be computed ...