A survey on cloud-based software platforms to implement secure smart grids

Smart Grid has been characterized as the next generation power grid in which modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will improve control, reliability and safety. Although the adoption of generic off-the-shelf ICT in Smart Grid provisions indisputable advantages and benefits, it raises several issues concerning the reliability and security of communications - the core infrastructure of Smart Grid. Cloud computing has developed and evolved over the past years becoming a real choice for Smart Grids infrastructure because of the availability, scalability, performance and interoperability that it offers. In this paper we present a survey of the existing cloud-based software platforms for implementing secure Smart Grids. Security issues like authentication and authorization of users, data encryption, availability, attacker impact, detection and trust management have received significant attention in previous work. Nevertheless, as shown in this paper, their integration and adaptation to emerging fields such as Smart Grid is still in an embryonic state. As such, we report recent advancements and software platforms specifically for Smart Grid and we outline several issues as well as suggestions for designing security-aware platforms for Smart Grid.