Trust system architecture for securing GOOSE communication in IEC 61850 substation network

Abstract

IEC 61850 is the standard for substation automation which enables substation equipment called Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) to communicate with each other. The communication protocol used by the IEDs to communicate is called GOOSE. Unfortunately, there are security researchers who have identified a number of vulnerabilities in the GOOSE protocol and have demonstrated that these vulnerabilities can be exploited to perform security attacks on the IEC 61850 network. By itself, the IEC 61850 standard does not address security requirements needed in a critical infrastructure. Therefore, a security mechanism to better protect the IEC 61850 network needs to be implemented. In their paper, Coates et al. has proposed a Trust System for securing the TCP/IP communication of SCADA network. However, due to the focus on TCP/IP communication, the Trust System by Coates et al. cannot be directly utilized for the IEC 61850 network because the IEDs are using GOOSE protocol to communicate. This paper proposed a Trust System for securing GOOSE communication between IEDs in IEC 61850 network. The proposed Trust System contains the modules for firewall, format and pattern validation, priority level assignment, alerting, blocking, and event logging. © 2016 SERSC.