Decentralized group authentication with membership verification in islanded smart grids

Abstract

Smart grids have a growing role in today's society. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure their proper functioning at all time. While research already investigated the islanding of the electrical side of the smart grids, we look at this problem from a network security perspective, this network being very decentralized and highly communicant. To prevent the loss communication and a possible blackout of the sub-grid through islanding, we used a combination of the group authentication protocol and the lightweight verifiable secret sharing to propose an alternative authentication method. This method allows the different nodes to build trust as well as to identify and exclude malicious nodes trying to either join or prevent the group authentication. We also discuss the main security properties of our protocol and its limitations.