Secure Communication Schemes for Smart Power Grid

Project (2):   Secure Communication Schemes for Smart Power Grid

The smart power grid is a revolutionary upgrade to the existing grid. It uses two-way communication and computational intelligence to create a system that is resilient and efficient. It also aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by integrating more renewable resources and electric vehicles (EVs). In this project, the REU students will work on the following cutting-edge research topic.

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Multicast Protocol. One of the main objectives of the smart grid is enabling several electricity suppliers (vendors) and consumers can subscribe to different vendors and programs. Thus, there is a need for a secure data multicast protocol to enable the grid operators and electricity suppliers to communicate securely with users who subscribe to a certain plan and/or reside in a specific area. Attribute based encryption (ABE) is a novel cryptosystem that can be used while considering secure multicasting. ABE is a type of public-key encryption in which the secret key of a user and the ciphertext are dependent upon attributes, e.g., the city in which a user lives, or the subscription plan. A ciphertext is generated based on an access policy which defines the set of attributes a user should have in order to decrypt that ciphertext. In this task, the REU students will study an efficient multicast scheme based on ABE to ensure message confidentiality. The REU students will use Raspberry Pis to emulate an AMI network and implement the proposed scheme and evaluate it.

Qualifications: Self-driven and outcome-oriented work attitude, strong programming skills in Java, and knowledge/strong interest in security, cryptography, and networking fields is a plus, but not mandatory.

Mentor: Dr. Mahmoud (mmahmoud@tntech.edu)