Evaluating Security Algorithms in the Substation Communication Architecture

Security becomes the major concern in a modernized electricity network. The IEC 61850 standard has been developed for substation automation, providing more enhancing communication functionalities. The standard defines several kinds of messages for data exchange between nodes in the substation. Among them, two critical messages have very stringent performance requirement for secure substation operation and protection. In this paper we design a security protocol for guaranteeing message authentication and integrity. In order to show whether the protocol can achieve the performance criteria imposed by the standard, we conduct some experiments on a desktop PC and an embedded device. Our study shows that the desktop PC is capable of satisfying performance criteria. However, the result shows that the embedded device has some limitation of handling incoming messages and processing cryptographic computation depending on the number of packets.