Security Issues and Challenges for the IoT-based Smart Grid

Internet of Things (IoT) is the next step evolution of our today Internet, where any physical object/thing having/equipped with computation and communication capabilities could be seamlessly integrated, at different levels, to the Internet. The Smart Grid (SG), which is considered as one of the most critical Infrastructures, is defined as the classical power grid augmented with a large-scale ICT and renewable energy integration, can be seen as one of the largest IoT network. The SG will involve billions of smart objects/things: smart meters, smart appliances, sensors, actuators-cars, etc. in addition to several communication infrastructures whether public (most often) or private. However, security is seen as one of the major factors hampering the rapid and large scale adoption and deployment of both the IoT vision and the Smart Grid. In this paper we investigate the security issues and challenges on the IoT-based SG, and define the major security services that we should consider when dealing with SG security