Cybersecurity of Sampled Value Messages in Substation Automation System

IEC61850 is the mainstream of the development for substation automation. This paper presents a practical consideration and analysis for implementing a secure sampled measured value (SeSV) message in substation automation system. Due to the lack of security features in the standard, IEC Working Group 15 of Technical Committee 57 published IEC62351 on security for IEC61850 profiles. However, the use of authentication methods for SV based on IEC62351 standards are still not integrated, and computational capabilities and performance are not validated and tested with commercial grade equipment. Hence, this paper shows the performance of security feature enabled SeSV packets transmitted between protection and control devices by appending a message authentication code (MAC) to the extended IEC61850 packets. A prototype implementation on a low cost commodity embedded system has proved that the MAC-enabled SV message can fully secure the process bus communication in the digital substation with negligible time delay.