Efficient Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid

Authors

mumin cebeFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor's Name

Kemal Akkaya

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

A. Selcuk Uluagac

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Ahmed S. Ibrahim

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Jason Liu

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Keywords

Smart Grid, Key Exchange, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), AMI, IoT

Date of Defense

7-2-2020

Abstract

With the increasing digitization of different components of Smart Grid by incorporating smart(er) devices, there is an ongoing effort to deploy them for various applications. However, if these devices are compromised, they can reveal sensitive information from such systems. Therefore, securing them against cyber-attacks may represent the first step towards the protection of the critical infrastructure. Nevertheless, realization of the desirable security features such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication relies entirely on cryptographic keys that can be either symmetric or asymmetric. A major need, along with this, is to deal with managing these keys for a large number of devices in Smart Grid. While such key management can be easily addressed by transferring the existing protocols to Smart Grid domain, this is not an easy task, as one needs to deal with the limitations of the current communication infrastructures and resource-constrained devices in Smart Grid. In general, effective mechanisms for Smart Grid security must guarantee the security of the applications by managing (1) key revocation; and (2) key exchange. Moreover, such management should be provided without compromising the general performance of the Smart Grid applications and thus needs to incur minimal overhead to Smart Grid systems. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by proposing specialized key management techniques for resource and communication constrained Smart Grid environments. Specifically, motivated by the need of reducing the revocation management overhead, we first present a distributed public key revocation management scheme for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) by utilizing distributed hash trees (DHTs). The basic idea is to enable sharing of the burden among smart meters to reduce the overall overhead. Second, we propose another revocation management scheme by utilizing cryptographic accumulators, which reduces the space requirements for revocation information significantly. Finally, we turn our attention to symmetric key exchange problem and propose a 0-Round Trip Time (RTT) message exchange scheme to minimize the message exchanges. This scheme enables a lightweight yet secure symmetric key-exchange between field devices and the control center in Smart Gird by utilizing a dynamic hash chain mechanism. The evaluation of the proposed approaches show that they significantly out-perform existing conventional approaches.

Identifier

FIDC009173

Previously Published In

2020, “Communication-efficient Certificate Revocation Management for AdvancedMetering Infrastructure”, Mumin Cebe, Kemal Akkaya.Elsevier Future Generation Computer System (Accepted)

2018, “Efficient certificate revocation management schemes for IoT-based advancedmetering infrastructures in smart cities”, Mumin Cebe, Kemal Akkaya.Journal of AdHoc Networks, Volume 92

.

Recommended Citation

cebe, mumin, "Efficient Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid" (2020). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4460.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4460