Singapore Academic Cybersecurity R&D

Harnessing R&D to Secure our Nation

Security and Privacy in Smart Grid Systems: Countermeasures and Formal Verification
 

• Lead PIs : Dong Jin Song, Professor, NUS ( dongjs@comp.nus.edu.sg ) and Martin Andrew, Professor, University of Oxford ( andrew.martin@cs.ox.ac.uk )
• Host Institution : School of Computing, NUS
• Partner Institution : University of Oxford

I. Goal

Smart grid system is becoming a crucial nation-wide infrastructure to avoid traditional problems such as energy rationing and power outages. However, its bi-directional communication between customers and energy suppliers introduces:

• Security problem : the customers and energy suppliers need to verify the authenticity and integrity of the transmitted information.
• Privacy problem : untrusted entities should not be allowed to access or infer the private information of individual customers.

II. Technologies

We propose an enhanced architecture to address the above issues by:

• Introduction of TRE : We introduce a trusted third party called a Trusted Remote Entity (TRE) situating between consumers and other entities (see Figure 1). It uses some techniques, e.g., Trusted Platform Module (TPM), to ensure the security and privacy for all the parties.
• Formal Verification : We build up a formal foundation for analyzing trusted computing system (see Figure 2). The formal foundation includes a formalism for modeling the trusted platforms, formal models of the key techniques in trusted computing, and various threat models. We leverage model checking to detect flaws from the designs of trusted platforms.