A Review of IEC 62351 Security Mechanisms for IEC 61850 Message Exchanges

Smart grid is the nexus of advanced information and communication technologies and legacy power systems. With increasing awareness on the vulnerabilities of smart grids to cyberattacks, cybersecurity is becoming a prime concern. Earlier, it was assumed that the power system communication protocols are very specialized and different, so the “security by obscurity” approach would be sufficient. However, with the standardization of communication protocols for power utilities and the emergence of the power market, this approach is no longer valid. IEC 62351 Standard has been published to provide security recommendations for different power system communication protocols including IEC 61850. IEC 61850 is emerging as the most promising and popular power system communication standard. Therefore, in this article, a detailed analysis of security threats, possible attacks, and security requirements for IEC 61850 communication is presented. Building on this, the security considerations presented in IEC 62351 for securing different IEC 61850 messages, such as generic object-oriented substation events (GOOSE), sampled values (SV), routable-GOOSE, routable-SV, and manufacturing message specification messages have been presented in great detail.