A lightweight key management protocol for secure communication in smart grids

With the introduction of smart grid technology as the next-generation power grid, monitoring and control of the power systems are facing new challenges. Smart grid technology increases the reliability, security, and efficiency of electrical grids. However, its strong dependencies on digital communication technology increase the system’s vulnerabilities to different types of cyber-attacks. The existing communication paradigm suffers from security weaknesses in the IEC 62351 standard, data transfer latency in Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) and Sample Values (SV) protocols. This paper proposes a secure communication protocol based on hash and private key to overcome the security weaknesses while facilitating the key agreement at the right time. IEC 61850 is not safe on its own, even with dedicated communication. Therefore, for the security of the standard, IEC 62351 is used.