Albert Treytl

High-speed narrowband PLC in Smart Grid landscape — State-of-the-art

The prospect of Smart Grid (SG) is becoming a reality in the recent years, covering different areas like smart metering, demand side management, or distributed generation. Communications play a central role in the SG architecture, because the power utilities need to collect important information to make optimal decisions for efficient power generation, transmission and distribution. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of narrow-band high-speed power line communications (PLC) - a promising communication platform for SG which offers advantages in coverage, costs and availability. Further, the paper presents an overview of DLC+VIT4IP (Distribution Line Carrier: Verification, Integration and Test of PLC Technologies and IP Communication for Utilities) a EU funded project under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) that aims to extend the existing PLC technologies by developing efficient transport of IPv6 protocol, automatic measurement, configuration and management, and security. In addition, the project is exploiting frequency ranges up to 500 kHz, to support systems serving larger smart grid applications.

IP-centric high rate narrowband PLC for smart grid applications

The Internet Protocol version 6 is expected to be a strong enabler for the smart grid, promising seamless communication and network technology independence. However, IP has to be delivered to the last node in the field in order to become the lingua franca of the future smart grid. This article presents a novel approach in power line communication that delivers high resilient communication capable of efficiently transmitting IPv6. Based on the requirements of smart grid applications, the architecture of the communication system developed in the DLC+VIT4IP project is presented. New techniques for integrating IPv6, IPsec security, robust header compression, and end-to-end QoS are described, demonstrating the capability of PLC to efficiently handle IPv6 in the field level of the smart grid.

Secure and reliable wide-area power-line communication for soft-real-time applications within REMPLI

The REMPLI project aims at designing and implementing a communication infrastructure for distributed data acquisition and remote control operation using the power grid as the communication medium. Aside of being a platform for automated meter reading with high time resolution, energy management and domotic applications, and the system provides status information about the power grid and its components, thus improving maintenance quality. In this paper we give an overview about the features and abilities of the REMPLI system, we show the system architecture, and we analyze the position of REMPLI in the market of power-line communication systems.

Traps and pitfalls in secure clock synchronization

Clock synchronization has become one of the enabling techniques to enable real-time on both application-and network level. One of the most promising and currently intensively discussed approaches is IEEE1588, a master slave based synchronization protocol, which is intended to be a protocol not only limited for one application use, but for many domains such as telecom, test and measurement or factory automation. For some of these application domains security is a crucial feature, not only to prevent malicious attacks, but also to avoid accidental disturbances such as wrongly configured devices in the net. For the sake of these security requirements in version 2 of the IEEE1588 standard an informative annex describes an extension of the widely accepted protocol. Nevertheless not only the extension of a protocol with security fields defines a secure system, also a policy has to declare what to do in certain cases. This paper describes this security extension and gives and extensive analysis on the applicable threads as well as an attack of the master and approaches to include version 2 switches in a secure IEEE1588 clock synchronized network.

Practical application of 1588 security

Version 2 of IEEE 1588 contains an extension to secure the given service of clock synchronization. This article describes a practical implementation of this extension for a clock synchronization network. Pitfalls also relevant to other implementations and important properties are discussed and performance results that cover normal operation and stress tests such as denial of service attacks are presented. Additionally, important concepts for integration of hardware timestamping and transparent clock support are presented, which are necessary to use the full potential in more complicated applications.

Security flaws and workarounds for IEEE 1588 (transparent) clocks

Synchronized clocks are fundamental for multiple applications sometimes also requiring to protect clock synchronization protocol information against malicious attacks. This article analyses security vulnerabilities of the IEEE 1588 clock synchronization protocol caused by a flaw in the integrity check value (ICV) calculation. The paper elaborates counter measures that protect protocol addresses and prevent the misuse of security associations to replay IEEE 1588 messages.

Functional safety and system security in automation systems - a life cycle model

Industrial and building automation systems are more and more important in industry and buildings. New services and novel fields of application call for dependable systems. Two very important properties of such a system are functional safety and system security. In the opposite of todaypsilas development where safety and security are treated separately, investigating security together with safety leads to a reduction of effort in the different phases of system life. That is because they have some similar objectives, but realized by different measures. The intention of the paper is to present a way of developing a safe and secure system as well as to show the associated benefit with special focus on building automation.

Securing IEEE 1588 by IPsec tunnels - An analysis

IPsec is one of the most widespread protocols to establish secure communication for the Internet Protocol. Besides the fact that this protocol is fully integrated in the Internet Protocol suite, the main advantage of using secure tunnels for IEEE 1588 clock synchronization is the reduced maintenance effort. Instead of requiring, e.g., different key management or connection setup protocols for each application a single tunnel can be used to protect underlying services such as clock synchronization by IEEE 1588 and many other applications. This paper analyzes the usage of IPsec security mechanisms to protect the IEEE 1588 clock synchronization protocol and, in particular, its impact on the precision of clock synchronization. Straightforward application as well as dedicated designs to integrate high-precision, hardware-supported clock synchronization are investigated. Measurements show that for lower precision IPsec can be applied straightforward, for high precision dedicated modification on hardware and algorithms are required.

Secure tunneling of high-precision clock synchronization protocols and other time-stamped data

This article analyzes the viability of secure tunneling for clock synchronization protocols with special respect to high-precision clock synchronization requiring hardware timestamping. It investigates whether security mechanisms introduced to protect timing information have an impact on the precision of clock synchronization. Two reference designs - one for an MII-based and one for a MAC-based time stamper - are used together with IPsec as a commonly used and favored secure tunneling protocol. Results of these investigations show that a straightforward application of the IPsec tunnel is not possible, yet there exist several possibilities to meet the requirements of secure high-precision hardware-supported clock synchronization together with IPsec, each however tied to special boundary conditions.

A Flexible Multi-Agent System Architecture for Plant Automation

Flexibility has become a key factor for manufacturing to keep competitive. software agent technology can be widely used to improve the flexibility of a plant and the manufacturing execution system (MES) used to control production. This paper introduces a multi-agent system design consisting of four types of agents covering the three layers of the plant automation pyramid from enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution system (MES), to the field control layer. The architecture and the communication protocols of each agent are presented and the increase in flexibility for mass customized and highly dynamically changing products such as car manufacturing or manifold production are given.