Abstract:
The Smart Grid (SG) initiative introduces a two-way
communication between utility companies and the consumers
thanks to Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks.
One of the most crucial components that constitute an AMI network
is smart meters (SMs). SMs execute some programs called
firmware to rule the hardware. The firmware occasionally needs
to be updated to fix bugs and improve the services. Since the SM
firmware is proprietary, the update file should be communicated
to the SMs in a secure way. In addition, the firmware update can
target a specific subgroup of the SMs rather than all of them. In
this paper, we address the problem of multicasting the firmware
update securely in an IEEE 802.11s-based SG AMI network and
develop a secure and reliable multicast-over-broadcast protocol
by making use of ciphertext-policy attribute-based signcryption
(CP-ABSC) to provide not only confidentiality and access control
but also message authentication. A hash of the firmware update
is signcrypted based on an access tree such that the hash can be
designcrypted only by the SMs possessing the attributes that can
satisfy the access tree. In this paper, we propose an attributebased
multicast-over-broadcast protocol called Broadcast-Alarm
(Bcast-Alarm) which is both secure and reliable. We assessed
its performance under ns-3 network simulator. The simulation
results have shown that Bcast-Alarm protocol can complete
downloading a firmware update file by consuming comparable
amount of bandwidth compared to unicasting.
