Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 6, numbers 3 and 4, 2013 // View article

Security Considerations for Multicast Communication in Power Systems

Authors:
Steffen Fries
Rainer Falk

Keywords: device authentication; multicast; real-time; network access authentication; firewall; substation automation; wide area condition monitoring

Abstract:
Information security is gaining increasingly more importance for real-time automation networks. Multicast communication is used widely especially on field and process level to cope with performance requirements and to ease the handling of communication peers as the destinations need not to be known by the sender. A security design must not interfere with these communication types. This paper investigates into different approaches to achieve multicast security focusing on energy automation networks. Here, domain-specific protocols like GOOSE are used within substations to distribute measurement and status information between IEDs using plain Ethernet superseding classical copper wire connections. Hence, they have to cope with high performance requirements in terms of very low latency and transfer time. For these reasons, a solution is required allowing to perform efficient authentication of field-level multicast communication. Moreover, this multicast authentication may also be applicable in WAN communication, as the substation protocol GOOSE is meanwhile also being applied to exchange synchrophasor data.

Pages: 111 to 121

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636