ASIA: An Access Control, Session Invocation and Authorization Architecture for Home Energy Appliances in Smart Energy Grid Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces ASIA, a security architecture designed to enhance access control, session management, and authorization for smart energy grid environments, focusing on protecting ICT gateways in smart homes.

Contribution

The paper presents the ASIA architecture, a novel security solution for smart energy grids that addresses ICT gateway discovery, addressing, and secure data exchange challenges.

Findings

ASIA effectively secures ICT gateways in smart energy grids.

The architecture supports reliable session invocation and authorization.

It addresses key security challenges in smart home integration.

Abstract

With the advent of the smart energy grid - an energy transportation and distribution network being combined with an IT network for its monitoring and control - information security has gained tremendous importance for energy distribution and energy automa- tion systems. Integrated security functionality is crucial to ensure a reliable and continuous operation of the smart energy grid. Further security related challenges arise from the integration of millions of smart homes into the smart grid. This paper gives an overview of the smart energy grid environment and its challenges. Many future use cases are centered around the smart home, using an ICT gateway. Approaches to protect the access and data exchange are described, preventing manipulation of ICT gateway operation. The paper presents ASIA - an Authentication, Session Invocation, and Authorization component to be used in the smart energy grid, to protect ICT gateways and to cope with problems like ICT gateway discovery and ICT gateway addressing.