Hardware-Based Randomized Encoding for Sensor Authentication in Power Grid SCADA Systems

Conference · 28 February 2022 · 2022 IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference (TPEC)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/tpec54980.2022.9750706· OSTI ID:1997020

Hutto, Kevin ^[1]; Grijalva, Santiago ^[1]; Mooney, Vincent ^[1]

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1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are utilized extensively in critical power grid infrastructures. Modern SCADA systems have been proven to be susceptible to cyber-security attacks and require improved security primitives in order to prevent unwanted influence from an adversarial party. One section of weakness in the SCADA system is the integrity of field level sensors providing essential data for control decisions at a master station. In this paper we propose a lightweight hardware scheme providing inferred authentication for SCADA sensors by combining an analog to digital converter and a permutation generator as a single integrated circuit. Through this method we encode critical sensor data at the time of sensing, so that unencoded data is never stored in memory, increasing the difficulty of software attacks. We show through experimentation how our design stops both software and hardware false data injection attacks occurring at the field level of SCADA systems.

• Research Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: CR0000004
• OSTI ID: 1997020
• Report Number(s): DOE-GATECH-00004-1
• Journal Information: 2022 IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference (TPEC), Conference: 2022 IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference 28 February 2022 - 1 March 2022 College Station, TX, USA
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
Hardware Security
Power Grid
False Data Injection