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Insider attack mitigation in a smart metering infrastructure using reputation score and blockchain technology

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Abstract

The increasing use of smart metering infrastructure invites security threats through trusted insiders in spite of the devices’ authentication phase. Trusted insiders equipped with high privilege are also become vulnerable to being attacked. In the presence of these malicious or compromised insiders, it becomes difficult to achieve an efficient, transparent, reliable, and cost-effective smart grid. Addressing the issues arising from an insider attack, we explore post-authentication attacks and present a reputation score-based model using blockchain technology. The reputation of a device is computed based on the neighbor’s opinion. The opinions and incentives are stored on a blockchain to ensure integrity, availability, and decentralization. We analyze the latency of the proposed model by modifying the open-source Go Ethereum and security effectiveness through a reputation simulator. In addition to this, storage, communication, resource usage overhead, and security requirements are also analyzed to prove the efficiency of the proposed model for the lightweight smart metering infrastructure.

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Funding

The work is funded by Department of Science and Technology(DST), India, for the Cyber Physical Security in Energy Infrastructure for Smart Cities (CPSEC) project under Smart Environments theme of Indo-Norwegian Call.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, Prayagraj, India

    Jaya Singh, Ayush Sinha, Priyanka Goli, Venkatesan Subramanian & Om Prakash Vyas

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Kanpur, India

    Sandeep Kumar Shukla

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  1. Jaya Singh
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  2. Ayush Sinha
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  3. Priyanka Goli
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  4. Venkatesan Subramanian
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Correspondence to Jaya Singh.

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Singh, J., Sinha, A., Goli, P. et al. Insider attack mitigation in a smart metering infrastructure using reputation score and blockchain technology. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 21, 527–546 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-021-00561-8

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