Design of a Secure Architecture for Last Mile Communication in Smart Grid Systems

Ever increasing need of electricity has paved the need for Smart Grids. Smart Meters, digitalized networks and fault tolerant systems are the basic infrastructure which supports Smart Grid. Security in Smart Grid has become a major concern in the present scenario. In this paper we have proposed security architecture at the last mile distribution in Home Area Networks. A Secure communication architecture has been modeled which focuses on secure data transmission between the Smart Meters at home and Central Gateway at the utility centre. Hybrid Encryption algorithms and Digital Signature has been used to provide data integrity. The strength of the model has been verified with the help of an attacker and the model is found to resist attacks. The Encryption time and Decryption time of the cyptostack is lower when compared with other encryption algorithms.