An Overview of Smart Grid Cyber-Security State of The Art Study

Smart Grid is the most outstanding engineering achievement of the 21st century in power systems. This is an emerging technology that is revolutionizing the conventional electric grid by providing new services based mainly on information Communication technology (ICT), which is considered to be its main enabler. Besides the different opportunities and advantages offered by ICT, Smart Grid suffers from its inherent challenges, especially, at the level of cyber-security. Consequently, there are several security threats that may affect Smart Grid. These can be divided into three categories, namely, people and policy threats, platform threats and network threats. To address these threats several approaches and mechanisms were developed based on cryptographic methods, authentication protocols and firewalls. This paper is dedicated to an overview study on Smart Grid Cyber-security challenges and to the different approaches available to address the different security threats.