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Evaluating the Timeliness of Cryptography for Securing ICS Protocols in Smart Grid
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DOI：10.1109/COMST.2026.3680907.png)
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Abstract
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For a safe and reliable power system, secure communication is crucial. Industrial control system (ICS) protocols, which play an important role in power grid communication, were designed decades ago without any built-in security techniques. Exploiting vulnerabilities in such protocols could result in unauthorized access, data manipulation and even lead to severe consequences such as complete blackouts of the power grid. Thus, the legacy ICS protocols utilized in smart grid communications should be transformed into secure protocols to mitigate cyberattacks. The fundamental building blocks to achieve security in the ICS protocols, covering confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation lie in cryptography. This paper explores where the major cryptographic algorithms, such as stream ciphers, block ciphers, elliptic-curve cryptography schemes, hash functions and authenticated encryption stand when they are used to secure the ICS protocols, in terms of performance and cost, while balancing the inherent characteristics of the smart grid environments such as strict time and resource constraints. We extensively evaluate a range of contemporary cryptographic schemes and analyze their effectiveness in smart grid communication. We analyze the performance of these cryptographic primitives on both hardware (FPGA-based) and software (microcontroller-based) platforms, assessing their impact on system efficiency and security. This study will be invaluable for researchers in the smart grid domain in selecting cipher suites according to the development platform (hardware or software) to ensure the optimal balance between performance and security.
Keywords:
ICS protocols
cryptography
security
smart grid
SCADA
FPGA
microcontroller
privacy
cyber-physical systems
IIoT
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