A new intrusion prevention system for protecting Smart Grids from ICMPv6 vulnerabilities

Smart Grid is an integrated power grid with a reliable, communication network running in parallel towards providing two way communications in the grid. It's trivial to mention that a network like this would connect a huge number of IP-enabled devices. IPv6 that offers 18-bit address space becomes an obvious choice in this context. In a smart grid, functionalities like neighborhood discovery, autonomic address configuration of a node or its router identification may often be invoked whenever newer equipments are introduced for capacity enhancement at some level of hierarchy. In IPv6, these basic functionalities like neighborhood discovery, autonomic address configuration of networking require to use Internet Control Message Protocol version 6 (ICMPv6). Such usage may lead to security breaches in the grid as a result of possible abuses of ICMPv6 protocol. In this paper, some potential newer attacks on Smart Grid have been discussed. Subsequently, intrusion prevention mechanisms for these attacks are proposed to plugin the threats.