A privacy-preserving based cyber security for communication attacks in active power distribution networks

With the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in a smart grid, system operators enable two-way communication between utility service providers and Smart Meters (SMs) installed in the consumers’ premises, enhancing operational efficiency. However, this exchange of information introduces potential vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, which may lead to the compromise of critical messages, electricity theft, and unauthorized access to sensitive information. These cyber-attacks are often driven by financial motives, have the ability to compromise the integrity, reliability, confidentiality, and authenticity of the communication channels. As a result, it is essential to develop robust cybersecurity measures to mitigate these potential cyber-attacks and their associated impacts. This paper presents a novel privacy-preserving framework to provide secure bi-directional communication between the utility service provider and SM by incorporating multi-party computation in non-pairing based two-level Hierarchical Identity Based Encryption (HIBE) to achieve mutual authentication. The key concept of proposed framework is to provide a secure multi-party computation protocol by combining HIBE and Verifiable Secret Sharing Scheme (VSSS) for the keys utilized by SMs to facilitate peer-to-peer energy trading within the Transactive Energy Management System (TEMS) under the smart grid paradigm. This approach eliminates the need for a third party or mediator, providing distinct advantages in terms of scalability and robustness in TEMS. Additionally, the proposed protocol employs the ROM to provide formal security analysis under the DDH assumption. The study also examined the informal theoretical security analysis to evaluate the proposed scheme’s robustness against communication attacks and security features. Finally, the proposed protocol has been implemented using Python 3.12, with realistic simulation parameters to analyze its performance and security features.