Cryptographic-based secure data exchange schemes for uplink and downlink communication in AMI networks

Abstract

The growing electricity demand and the need for intelligent and modernized power infrastructures have emerged in the concept of "smart" grid. This later integrates Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in its underlying networks to achieve decentralized control of electrical supply and demand in order to reduce electricity waste and energy costs. Two-way information and electricity flow between the utility headend and customers are the main features that characterize the smart grid. These features empower many functions to be implemented and enhancements to be applied to the legacy power grid. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a central smart grid element that plays a vital role in realizing numerous modernized applications such as demand response, automated metering reading and remote management control by empowering bi-directional communication between the utility and its’ customers. This architecture relies on violable devices such as smart meters and semi-open communication channels to exchange massive amount of sensitive information. This, in addition to the inherited weakness of the power grid paves the way to countless number of security threats that never existed in the legacy power grid. Being a part of an electricity system, AMI possess unique characteristics that puts challenging constraints on designing efficient security protocols to protect data exchange in its’ networks. In this thesis, we address the need for secure data exchange in AMI networks by proposing requirements-driven cryptographic-based solutions to protect single and multiple recipient communications. Single-recipient communication represents the unicast data transmission of energy consumption reports from the smart meters towards the utility headend to ensure correct customer billing. Preserving customer privacy is the most important security goal for uplink data communication, therefore we designed HE-SSRU, a hybrid encryption scheme that exploits the strength of public-key cryptography with the efficiency of symmetric cryptography to secure uplink communication between the smart meters and Utility Master Computer (UMC). The proposed scheme integrates additional security features to ensure authenticity of metering information and mitigates numerous attacks such as replay, data modification and spoofing attack. In addition, we propose S-CP-ABE, a novel lightweight signcryption scheme based on Attribute-Based Encryption to achieve secure multiple-recipient downlink communication in AMI networks. The scheme enforces robust access control mechanism by permitting the control center to determine the smart meters eligible for accessing the secure data by constructing the ciphertext according to an access policy defined over a set of attributes. Authorized meters with attributes satisfying the access policy can decrypt the ciphertext by obtaining a decryption token from the attribute authority. The protocol is different from most of the ABE schemes in the sense that we built it without using the complex bilinear pairing operations. Our scheme maintains confidentiality and authenticity of control center messages and is resilient against collusion, replay, and signature forgery attacks. Performance evaluation shows that our proposed approaches outperform existing schemes from the literature in terms of computational complexity, communication overhead and storage requirements.

Date	15 Jul 2020
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Michel Kadoch (Supervisor)