Using an IPsec VPN to Secure The Network Communication in The Smart Grid

Abstract

The increasing demand for energy consumption has led to burning a lot of fossil fuels and emitting large amounts of carbon. The electricity grid was developed to allow the production of electricity through renewable sources and the use of information and communication technology, and hence it was called the smart grid. A smart grid consists of seven domains connected to each other through an information network to exchange data for the operation of the grid. Securing this data is essential to maintain the efficient functioning of the smart grid. This article proves that the use of ESP protocol with tunnel mode in IPsec VPN is suitable for the power grid to secure communication between domains and reduce the risk of cyberattacks. Evaluation of various IPsec VPN authentication, encryption and hashing algorithms proves that AES and HMAC-SHA2 protocols are more secure than DES, 3DES, SEAL, HMAC-MD5 and HMAC-SHAI. Measurement of data throughput and communication delay between two domains shows less delay, throughput and duration occur when using plain text messages but provides no security.