Energy Big Data Security Threats in IoT-Based Smart Grid Communications

Increased intelligence and automation in smart grid results in many heterogeneous applications benefiting from the Internet of Things, such as demand response, energy delivery efficiency/reliability, and fault recovery. However, vulnerabilities in smart grid arise due to public communication infrastructure and Internet-based protocols. To deal with security threats, energy big data should be thoughtfully stored and processed to extract critical information, and security and blackout warnings should be given in an early stage. This work gives a comprehensive tutorial and survey to highlight research challenges on the aforementioned issues in the Internet-of-Things-based smart grid. We demonstrate that a stealthy and blind energy big data attack can be launched using a replay scheme. Also, we elucidate an intuitive geometric viewpoint for this type of attack. The proposed attack can bypass bad data detection successfully using either DC or AC state estimation.