Design and Implementation of Secured Hybrid Gateway Node for Securing IoT - Enabled Distribution Automation

Abstract

The integration of smart grid and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies plays a crucial role in enhancing the quality of services provided by traditional electrical grids. This combination has enabled the introduction of new services, such as demand response, automatic meter reading, and IoT-enabled Distribution Automation (IoT-DA), which incorporates sensors, actuators, intelligent electrical devices (IEDs), and information and communication technologies to monitor and control the grid. However, this integration also introduces network security risks, including Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, false data injection, and masquerading attacks, such as system node impersonation that can transmit incorrect readings, trigger false alarms, and lead to improper node control. To address these challenges, a secure hybrid gateway node was designed and implemented to safeguard communication networks. This solution uses Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) for Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to transmit historical data and mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS) for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) to send switching messages. The results demonstrate that the secured hybrid gateway node successfully ensures data confidentiality, integrity, and resilience against DoS attacks. In the future, this study will measure the efficiency of the implemented of the secured hybrid gateway node in terms of the security and performance in IoT devices by analyzing energy and memory usage.