Enabling a Zero Trust Architecture in a 5G -enabled Smart Grid

2025-04-29 0 0 474.81KB 18 页 10玖币

侵权投诉

Enabling a Zero Trust Architecture in a 5G-enabled Smart Grid

Mohammad Ali Alipour a, Saeid Ghasemshirazi b, Ghazaleh Shirvani c

a Department of Energy Management and Optimization, Institute of Science and High Technology and Environmental Science,

Graduate University of Advanced Technology, Kerman, Iran, m.alialipour77@gmail.com

b Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran, saeidgs@yahoo.com

c Department of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran, ghazaleh.sh3p@gmail.com

Abstract

One of the most promising applications of the IoT is the Smart Grid (SG). Integrating SG's data communications

network into the power grid allows for gathering and analyzing information from power lines, distribution power

stations, and end users. A smart grid (SG) requires a fast and dependable connection to provide real-time monitoring

through the IoT. Hence 5G could be considered a catalyst for upgrading the existing power grid systems. Nonetheless,

the additional attack surface of information infrastructure has been brought about by the widespread adoption of

ubiquitous connectivity in 5G, to which the typical information security system in the smart grid cannot respond

promptly. Therefore, guaranteeing the Privacy and Security of a network in a threatening, ever-changing environment

requires groundbreaking architectures that go well beyond the limitations of traditional, static security measures. With

"Continuous Identity Authentication and Dynamic Access Control" as its foundation, this article analyzes the Zero

Trust (ZT) architecture specific to the power system of IoT and uses that knowledge to develop a security protection

architecture.

Keywords

Smart Grid, Zero Trust, 5G Networks, Security Architecture, IoT

1. Introduction

Electricity is crucial to our contemporary way of life and economy; however, most nations still use power grids that

were put in place around 50 years ago, making them inefficient and unable to meet the urgent needs of the modern

world[1]. An estimated thirteen trillion dollars investment will be needed to upgrade our energy infrastructure over

the next two decades to meet the demands of a modern, efficient power grid. As a result, there is a looming need and

opportunity to switch to a low-carbon, efficient, clean energy system.

Smart grids will be an essential facilitator of this revolution. SG is an intelligent digitized energy network, optimally

delivering electricity from generation to consumption. Integration of data, communications, and power technologies

into the grid makes this possible. Some advantages of a smart grid are:

• Increased productivity and sustainability of energy generation

• More renewable energy sources will be incorporated into the preexisting infrastructure

• Supporting the development of electric vehicles

• Innovative strategies to help consumers reduce their energy consumption

• Less carbon dioxide emissions

Smart Grid is not just about enhancing the current infrastructure that helps our society; it's also about fulfilling the full

potential of what we can provide, such as innovative transportation solutions, support for new markets, and the most

efficient use of available resources. To provide constant connectivity between power companies and their consumers,

a Smart Grid implements technologies that combine computing and networking with physical mechanisms. However,

physical issues and cyber-attacks continuously threaten the availability and integrity of the grid, which might have

negative social and financial consequences. Natural disasters and reliance on the public internet, which is susceptible

to cyberattacks, are increasing the frequency of malfunctions and breaches[2].

Reliability of the electricity system is essential to guarantee a high standard of living. Because of its vital importance,

the power system is vulnerable to cyberattacks that might spread panic and have far-reaching financial impacts. A

great example of this could be Ukraine's electricity infrastructure cyberattack in 2015[3]. Consequently, an

unauthorized intrusion caused an outage in the distribution firms' SCADA system.

Many different types of attacks apply to this zone; some examples are replay attacks, Dos attacks, MITM attacks, and

false data injection attacks[4]. For a more reliable smart grid, this article suggests a policy that characterizes

"Continuous Identity Authentication and Dynamic Access Control", known as the Zero Trust approach[5,6].

Nevertheless, Zero Trust at the IoT or smart grid scale is impractical due to the curated communication rate and

bottlenecks. As research delves into zero trust for IoT, they indicated that one major factor that promises a practical

application of ZT is 5G. So far as we are aware, this research is the first to explore 5G applications utilizing ZT to

improve smart grid security.

Fifth-generation wireless networks incorporating a 5G network slicing approach could offer smart grid services,

including grid monitoring, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and precise load control[7,8]. 5G connectivity

features high bandwidth, low latency, excellent dependability, and low power usage. Therefore, 5G technologies have

the potential for novel applications due to their enhanced mobile capacity, ultra-low latency communication, and

universal terminal access. With the Utilization of 5G communication, it would be possible to streamline the gathering

and analysis of data on power usage and enhance the precision with which power loads are managed[9,10].

The perception and transmission performance of numerous user nodes in the Internet of Things can be improved by

developing a 5G cognitive radio network model and its application to conventional gathering and inspection services

IoT. The ability to acquire and visualize data for various smart grid levels is a potential advantage of 5G technology

for the future smart grid. Smart grid applications bring new vulnerabilities, such as security misconfiguration at edge

hosts and IoT device security concerns, and most importantly that 5G networks cannot offer end-to-end Security for

these scenarios[11].

When using wireless technologies like 5G for mission-critical applications in the smart grid, further precautions must

be taken to prevent unwanted access to the network. Therefore, numerous 5G smart grid AMI components might be

subject to denial-of-service (DoS) or fake data injection attacks, leading to financial or nonfinancial

repercussions[12,13].

2. Contributions

This paper’s primary goal is to apply the Zero Trust mindset to a smart grid with a 5G communication network. This

security model was neither employed nor applied to the communication network in the previous papers. In this paper,

we apply Zero Trust in 5G-enabled Smart Grid To cover this gap. The following could serve as a summary of the

main contributions: A comprehensive review of the smart grid and zero trust was carried out, and each component

was explained. Moreover, in the methodology section, the communication network and smart grid components

employing zero trust, such as breakers, are described. Consequently, zero trust is applied to the modeled 5g network.

At the time of writing this paper, no study assessing zero trust within the 5G-enabled Smart Grid exists.

3. Background

3.1. Smart Grids

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes Smart Grid as consisting of seven subsystems:

generation, transmission, distribution, markets, customers, service providers, and operations. The end-user is the

primary participant in the customer domain. Customers typically fall into three categories: residential, industrial, and

building or commercial. In addition, some actors are prosumers, which means they can consume electricity and

generate it at the same time[10]. This domain is electrically linked to the distribution area and communicates with the

distribution, marketplaces, service provider, and operation[14].

Electrical power is transmitted from the generating domain to the distribution domain through a series of substations

across great distances. Additionally, it can be used to generate and store electricity. The SCADA system used to

monitor and operate the transmission network includes communications, monitoring, and controlling tasks[15].

The term "distribution" describes the whole ecosystem of companies and organizations that move energy from

generation to consumption. Radial, looping, and mesh topologies are only a few possible arrangements for an electrical

distribution network. Energy production and storage are included in the distribution domains linked to the transmission

system, the ultimate customer, and power consumption metering stations.

Electricity market operators and consumers are the actors in this sector[16]. This space keeps up the harmony between

the supply and request of power. Consequently, To adjust supply and demand, the showcase interatomic with vitality

supply spaces, such as the spaces for Bulk Generation and dispersed vitality assets[10].

3.2. Zero Trust

Regarding information security, the Zero Trust paradigm stipulates that no one, within or outside the network, can be

trusted. The "never trust, always verify" philosophy dictates that businesses must take precautions to protect the

confidentiality of any data stored on any device accessible by any user, application, or network[17].

When it comes to Security, ZT isn't concerned with securing individual nodes but rather the resources those nodes

contain; in other words, instead of assuming that every user on a network is trustworthy and has permission to access

its resources, ZT assumes that nobody on the network, internal or external, has either. This is a direct response to

growing needs inside businesses for securing their cloud-based assets and remote workers[18].

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

10 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载

摘要：

EnablingaZeroTrustArchitectureina5G-enabledSmartGridMohammadAliAlipoura,SaeidGhasemshirazib,GhazalehShirvanicaDepartmentofEnergyManagementandOptimization,InstituteofScienceandHighTechnologyandEnvironmentalScience,GraduateUniversityofAdvancedTechnology,Kerman,Iran,m.alialipour77@gmail.combDepartmento...

展开>> 收起<<

Enabling a Zero Trust Architecture in a 5G -enabled Smart Grid.pdf

共18页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Enabling a Zero Trust Architecture in a 5G -enabled Smart Grid

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: