Cyber Security and Privacy Issues in Smart Grids

The smart grid is a “promising power delivery infrastructure” which includes both information technology and electricity systems. Many nations (e.g., U.S., EU, Canada, China, Australia, South Africa, etc.) are looking toward this technology to modernize their power grids. This allows it to attack the problem of energy and environmental sustainability by monitoring, predicting, and managing energy usage on a consumer and system scale, which has many economic and social benefits. However, it is an extremely vulnerable technology from a cybersecurity standpoint. It is feared that the smart grids can be attacked physically or by malicious software to harm the system or use the system’s resources to perform its own tasks. This could cause large-scale economic problems such as misbilling of individual accounts due to attacks as well as large-scale privacy concerns for individuals whose personal information is collected from these accounts. Three areas to be further studied to enhance the cybersecurity of the smart grid is the integrity and confidentiality of the transmitted data, the building of a robust and efficient dispatching and management model for the SCADA system, and the establishment of a universal policy and standard for secure communication technology. To eliminate security problems for the individual, solutions can be found in state-of-the-art techniques like anonymity, access control, and accountability. Possible future research directions may include following subsections: control system security, power system security, accountability, integrity and confidentiality, and privacy.