Ultra-Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Securing the Substation and Control Center Communications in Smart Grids

The next-generation power grid, which uses smart grid technologies, presents significant challenges for power system monitoring and control. The monitoring and control are conducted using Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. However, the dependence of smart grids on digital communication technology increases its vulnerability to various types of attacks. Even though several solutions are proposed to protect smart grid environment against the possible security threats, the current SCADA networks still have significant flaws. In this paper, we propose an ultralightweight authentication scheme for securing communications between substations and control centers using only a few numbers of cryptographic hash functions. A comparison with related work has been made in terms of computation cost; the comparison shows that the proposed scheme consumes the lowest computation cost which makes the suggested scheme more suitable for smart grids environment.