Smart Grid network has a significant security challenges as a result of vast applications range, small and large number of smart devices and small data transmissions. When we deal with smart home devices within the customer home, there will be a great security concern because these smart devices gather information about customer home activities. One of the Smart Grid subsystems which are vulnerable to security threats could be Home Area Network (HAN). To properly maintain the security of Smart Grid Home Area Network (SG-HAN), an efficient mechanism to tackle the security threats in such network must be considered. The proper functionality of SG-HAN can be seriously affected by a number of attacks apart from the simplest eavesdropping attack. It is also possible for an adversary to launch attacks at different layers of the protocol stack in SG-HAN. In line with this, it is necessary to consider the various security attacks that could be encountered in SG-HAN. Therefore, in this paper we propose secure session key exchange scheme in SG-HAN that ensures defence against well-known attacks between the Smart House Devices (SHD) and the Smart Meter (SM) by using freshness counter. The security analysis is done for different attack scenarios. The impact of black hole and denial of service (DoS) attacks as well as the interference between different communication protocols within the HAN in the performance of the HAN is evaluated. The evaluation is carried out by OPENT MODELER 16.1 simulation tool. Its confidentiality and integrity is verified by security analysis. Our security analysis and simulation result showed the necessity of the proposed security scheme so as to maintain the secure communication between SM and SHDs within SG-HAN.
Keywords— Home Area Network, Smart Grid, Smart Home Device, Smart Meter, Trusted Key Distribution Server.