Steganography based Low Complexity Authentication Scheme for Synchrophasor Communication

Successful cyber-attack on synchrophasor network can have devastating impacts on the power grids. One of the limitations of the IEEE standard C37.118-2 is that it does not address the security requirements of synchrophasor communications. In the IEEE standard C37.118-2, Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) has been proposed for validating synchrophasor data and does not specify any form of authentication between communicating devices. Commonly, cryptography is used for message authentication. However, cryptography based authentication schemes are often computationally demanding and are not preferred for synchrophasor communication where resources are not available to perform high computations. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a steganography based low complexity scheme for authentication of synchrophasor data. Real time data transfer between Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) instances has shown that with increase in the number of bytes, the proposed scheme performs better than the existing standard hashing functions.

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