A blind processing framework to facilitate openness in smart grid communications

Smart grid has diverse stakeholders that often require varying levels of access to grid state and measurements. At the distribution level (i.e., MAN), smart grid provides two way communication between households and utilities. At the transmission level (i.e., WAN), multiple organizations need to share the transmission lines and cooperate with participants in their region. In this paper, we propose secure communication and computation services for smart grid to transform the current “closed cyber architecture” to an “open cyber architecture”. In order to ensure the privacy and integrity of communicating parties at the distribution level, we propose to utilize the smart meters as a gateway between intra-network (i.e., HAN) and inter-network (i.e., WAN) communications, and manage incoming and outgoing traffic and mediate household devices based on the instructions from the electric utility or contracted service providers. To enhance data sharing between operators at the transmission level, we propose an open cyber architecture that utilizes blind processing service, in which sensitive data is transmitted through the secured channel and used in computations running in an isolated environment while the outcome is rendered only to a dedicated user or process. The “open” communication between the smart substructures and “blind” computation at operation centers will increase data sharing, minimize human intervention, and mitigate cascading events. In the paper, we provide and discuss underlying mechanisms to achieve an open cyber architecture.