Authentication and integrity protection for real-time cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical system (CPS) is a collaborative system of cyber and physical devices that work together to facilitate automation, communication, and sharing of information in real time. This chapter examines the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in a smart grid environment, in which energy consumption data collected by smart meters is collected and aggregated in real time. Thus, allowing the system operators to analyse the energy usage to improve consumer service by refining utility operating and asset management processes more efficiently. Data aggregation is an integral part of AMI deployment. Data aggregation reduces the number of transmissions, thereby reducing communication costs and increasing the bandwidth utilization of AMI. However, the concentrator (the entity that aggregates the energy readings) poses a considerable risks of being tampered with, leading to erroneous bills, and possible consumer disputes. In this chapter, we discuss an end-to-end integrity protocol using elliptic curve-based chameleon hashing to provide data integrity and authenticity. The concentrator generates and sends a chameleon hash value of the aggregated readings to the Meter Data Management System (MDMS) for verification, while the smart meter with the trapdoor key computes and sends a commitment value to the MDMS so that the resulting chameleon hash value calculated by the MDMS is equivalent to the previous hash value sent by the concentrator. By comparing the two hash values, the MDMS can validate the integrity and authenticity of the data transmitted by the concentrator