SECRET: Secured Real-Time Authentication Tag for Smart Grid Based on Cellular Automata

A smart grid is a widespread electrical infrastructure equipped with diverse computing and communication resources that enable power transmission across different suppliers and consumers. While such connectivity allows balanced power distribution and smart monitoring, it introduces several vulnerabilities that expose the network to cyber threats. An unauthorized access to power grid poses a critical threat that may fully jeopardize the system causing massive power outage. Most of the existing schemes are designed to safeguard the security of customers’ data and rely on key-based authentication, verified only once in the beginning. However, cyber-attacks arriving later may cleverly occlude a user’s identity and redirect the power flow stealthily to the interceptor thus depriving both the genuine consumer and the supplier. In this work, we propose, for the first time, a secured smart-grid authentication scheme (SECRET) that is capable of providing “key-less” as well as “periodic” authentication in real-time. Our scheme utilizes time-series data from smart meters and produces a “tag” to be verified by the supply nodes. We use a technique based on Cellular Automata (CA) to support lightweight implementation of the authentication scheme. The dynamic evolution of CA provides randomness that is utilized to enhance security measures. Not only it obviates the complexity of key generation, but also reduces the cost and overhead for sharing keys. The proposed scheme has been analyzed against accessibility and various network attacks. Hardware implementation of the CA-based scheme on the Xilinx FPGA platform demonstrates that a small chip attached to smart meters can achieve faster and cost-effective authentication of users in smart-grid infrastructures.