Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 13, numbers 1 and 2, 2020 // View article
Authors:
Katrin Neubauer
Sebastian Fischer
Rudolf Hackenberg
Keywords: Smart Grid; Internet of Things; security analysis; safety-critical infrastructure; cloud computing; 4-Level-Trust-Model
Abstract:
The digital transformation has found its way into business and private life. It consists of digitization and digitalization. Digitization means the technical process and digitalization is the socio-technological process. Technologies of digitization are Cloud Computing (CC), Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Grid (SG), which are separate technologies. The increasing digitalization in the private sector and of the energy industry connect these technologies. Actually, there is no connection between the CC infrastructure and the SG infrastructure at the moment, because in Germany the SG is currently under construction. If one looks at the CC and IoT, it must be stated there is an connection between the IoT infrastructure and the CC infrastructure as a service provider. To connect the technologies CC, IoT and SG and also build an SG cloud for innovative services, the new laws for privacy must be implemented. For privacy and security analyses it is important to know which data can be stored and distributed on a cloud. To illustrate this analysis, we connect the SG infrastructure with the IoT. An IoT device (car charging station) should be able to transfer data to and from the SG. SG is a critical infrastructure and the IoT device a potential insecure device and network. We show the communication between the smart meter switching box and the IoT device and the data transferred between their clouds. The charging station is connected to the SG to get the current amount of renewable energy in the grid. This is necessary to create a new smart service. But this service also generates private data (e.g., name, address, payment details). The private data should not be transferred to the IoT cloud. For the connection of SG and IoT, availability, confidentiality and integrity must be ensured. A risk analysis over all the cloud connections, including the vulnerability and the ability of an attacker, the resulting risk and the 4-Level-Trust-Model for security assessment are developed. Furthermore, we show the application of the 4-Level-Trust-Model in this paper.
Pages: 11 to 20
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2020. Used with permission.
Publication date: June 30, 2020
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2652