%0 Journal Article %T BVS: A Lightweight Forward and Backward Secure Scheme for PMU Communications in Smart Grid %A Wei Ren %A Jun Song %A Min Lei %A Yi Ren %J International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting %D 2011 %I Hindawi Publishing Corporation %R 10.1155/2011/382147 %X In smart grid, phaser measurement units (PMUs) can upload readings to utility centers via supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) or energy management system (EMS) to enable intelligent controlling and scheduling. It is critical to maintain the secrecy of readings so as to protect customers' privacy, together with integrity and source authentication for the reliability and stability of power scheduling. In particular, appealing security scheme needs to perform well in PMUs that usually have computational resource constraints, thus designed security protocols have to remain lightweight in terms of computation and storage. In this paper, we propose a family of schemes to solve this problem. They are public key based scheme (PKS), password based scheme (PWS) and billed value-based scheme (BVS). BVS can achieve forward and backward security and only relies on hash functions. Security analysis justifies that the proposed schemes, especially BVS, can attain the security goals with low computation and storage cost. 1. Introduction Smart grid is envisioned as a long-term strategy for national energy independence, controlling emission, and combating global warming [1]. Smart grid technologies utilize intelligent transmission to deliver electricity, together with distribution networks to enable two-way communications. These approaches aim to improve reliability and efficiency of the electric system via gathering consumption data, delivering dynamic optimization of operations, and arranging energy saving schedules. The smart grid promises to transform traditional centralized, producer-controlled network to a decentralized, consumer-interactive network. For example, consumers react to pricing signals delivered by control unit from smart meters to achieve active load adjustment. Supervisory control And data acquisition (SCADA) or energy management system (EMS) may collect one data points every 1 to 2£¿seconds, whereas phaser measurement units (PMUs) may collect 30 to 60£¿data points per second [2]. The security of smart grid is a critical issue for its applicability, development and deployment [3¨C7]. On one hand, the security, and especially the availability of power supplying system, affects homeland security, as it is an indispensable infrastructure for pubic living system [8¨C10]. That is, any transient interruption will result in economic and social disaster. On the other hand, introduction of end devices such as PMUs requests for data and communication security to support secure and reliable uploading of measurements [11, 12]. As the PMUs are exposed far %U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijdmb/2011/382147/