Security protocol design against malicious attacks in neighborhood area network in smart grid

• Main Author: Li, Xiaochen
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65887
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In smart grid, the wireless mesh network (WMN) is an essential technique to connect mesh points in neighborhood area network (NAN), which is based on the wireless local area network (WLAN) and Ad hoc network. WMN not only inherits the merits from both of them, but also has its own feature, including wider coverage, broader bandwidth, better scalability, etc. It is attractive to suppliers and users that WMN supports wireless broadband services with low investment. However, despite its causal deployment and easy operation, the inherent security issues in WMN is increasingly drawing wide attention of experts and users. Without guarantee of safety, the value of this network will extremely decrease. In wireless mesh network, each party of the connection is supposed to have an authentication process to make sure the authenticity of each other. To ensure the security, dynamic key refreshment and 4-way handshake are used. Based on original 4-way handshake protocol standard, Mr. Bin Hu and Mr. Hamid Gharavi proposed the Merkle-Tree Based Handshaking Scheme (MTBH) that can overcome most vulnerabilities found in 4-way handshake. However, the new protocol still has the vital problem when it is faced with the DoS attack and replay attack. In this project, I analyzes the threats and attacks in wireless mesh network together with the improved 4-way handshake protocol. Based on this analysis, I suggest some modification for the improved 4-way handshake protocol and purpose the Bilateral HMAC Based Protection Scheme (BHBP) to make it feasible and able to prevent DoS attack and replay attack more effectively and efficiently. All of my analysis, comparison and verification are based on simulator named Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT) as well as the logical derivation using BAN Logic.