Denial of Service Attack on Protocols for Smart Grid Communications

Abstract

In this work, a denial of service (DoS) attack known as the clogging attack has been performed on three different modern protocols for smart grid (SG) communications. The first protocol provides authentication between smart meters (SM) and a security and authentication server (SAS). The second protocol facilitates secure and private communications between electric vehicles (EV) and the smart grid. The third protocol is a secure and efficient key distribution protocol for the smart grid. The protocols differ in either their applications (authentication, key distribution), or their ways of communications (usage of encryption, hashes, timestamps etc.). But they are similar in their purpose of design (for the smart grid) and their usage of computationally intensive mathematical operations (modular exponentiation, ECC) to implement security. Solutions to protect these protocols against this attack are then illustrated along with identifying the causes behind the occurrence of this vulnerability in SG communication protocols in general.