Biometric authentication in Smart Grid

The Smart Grid being developed nationwide aims at bringing modern IT network into the industrial control system (ICS) network to more effectively generate, transmission, and distribute electricity. These networks have their unique vulnerabilities and face all types of threats. Interconnecting them will undoubtedly increase complexity, introduce new vulnerabilities and the combined network will become more attractive to hackers. How successful the Smart Grid project can be largely depends on how well it defends against remote network-based attacks. User authentication for accessing the Smart Grid is the first and strongest line of defense against these types of attacks. Modern password based authentication mechanism has been proven inadequate. It is believed that biometric authentication will significantly improve the security of the Smart Grid network. In this paper we propose using biometrics to authenticate users accessing the Smart Grid. Firstly we look at a few biometric traits that have been proposed for user authentication in modern IT network and physical access control. Then we propose privacy-enhanced methods of applying fingerprint for user authentication. The proposed approaches can help relieve user's privacy concern for their fingerprint data, mainly due to its traditional usage for crime and background investigation. Since our methods improve the secrecy of biometric data, they make it possible to include biometrics as a factor in the desired multifactor user authentication for the Smart Grid.