The underlying legacy communication infrastructures, which may have severely constrained bandwidth, are under a lot of strain as a result of adding new smart devices and increased data collection for better control decisions in the Smart Grid infrastructure. Therefore, publish-subscribe architectures are becoming common, which not only enable flexible communication options but also take advantage of the multicast/broadcast abilities to minimize the amount of data messages transmitted.

To enable secure multicast/broadcast data exchange, there must be underlying mechanisms to generate keys due to the importance of security in any of these scenarios. A group key is employed for protecting the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of broadcast messages. Although the generation of session keys for unicast communications has been the subject of extensive research, this does not entirely apply to group communications (i.e., key generation, distribution, and renewal in Smart Grid environments). In addition, there need to be efficient mechanisms for any type of key generation to minimize the disruption to data traffic when keys are being updated. 

This project focuses on achieving an efficient key management scheme to secure both unicast and broadcast communications in publish-subscribe (i.e., OPC UA) based Smart Grid applications.  For instance, one component of the project explores a secure key management scheme that integrates dynamic key generation with Shamir’s secret sharing to achieve efficient group key management. The other component investigates more efficient broadcasts for DDS protocol.  

People: Yacoub Hanna, Juan Leon, Dr. Mumin Cebe, Dr. Suat Mercan, and Dr. Kemal Akkaya  

Publications:

Y. Hanna, M. Cebe, S. Mercan, and K. Akkaya, “Efficient Group-Key Management for Low-bandwidth Smart Grid Networks,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm), 2021, pp. 188-193, doi: 10.1109/SmartGridComm51999.2021.9631988.

Leon, Juan, Yacoub Hanna, and Kemal Akkaya “Development and evaluation of a publish/subscribe IoT data sharing model with LoRaWAN” Open Journal of Internet of Things (OJIOT) 8.1 (2022): 7-19.