Abstract: Integrating information network into power system is the key for realizing the vision of smart grid, but also introduces many security problems. Moreover, smart grid is an attractive target for various hackers with diversified motivations, e.g. unethical customers may want to modify their meter readings to evade the electric charge; malicious users are able to extract the behaviors of household by eavesdropping the communications of smart meters. Wireless communication offers the benefits of low cost, rapid deployment, shared communication medium and mobility at the same time, it causes many security and privacy challenges. In this paper, the concept of dynamic secret is applied to design an encryption scheme for smart grid wireless communication. Dynamic wireless encryption works in a different concept where the master key is changed during time. Master key, the key which is needed to communicate between sender and receiver. Even if a hacker captures the key, he will not be able to receive data continuously from sender since the master key will change with time. In our project, a smart grid platform is built, employing the ZigBee protocol for wireless communication. Thus a data encryption standard (DES) algorithm has been developed to transmit our data securely. The length of the key that is generated in data encryption standard (DES) is 64 bits out of which 8 bits are removed for parity so now the key is of length 56 bits .So there are 72 quadrillion number of keys that can be generated. A dynamic secret-based encryption demo system is designed based on this platform. The results show that it is impossible for the adversary to track the updating of the dynamic encryption key.
Keywords: Dynamic secret-based encryption, retransmission, security, smart grid, wireless Communication, ZigBee.