Cyber security in smart grid SCADA automation systems

Cyber attacks into modern SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) lead to vulnerabilities as International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 has no security features inbuilt. IEC 62351 is used to secure IEC 61850 profiles. SCADA power utilities, using IEC 61850 protocol, are facing problem of key management as it is not outlined in IEC 62351. In recent times, key management in SCADA networks is a major challenge. Due to lack of resources and low latency requirements in SCADA networks, it is infeasible to use traditional key management schemes such as RSA based PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).This paper will give a general insight on the development of security mechanisms to secure substation level SCADA communication which has a Bump-in-the-wire (Bitw) device. Finally, we propose a security solution to eliminate the problem of key management by integrating CDAC´s key distribution and management protocol Sec-KeyD into IEC 62351 to secure IEC 61850 protocol.