Risk Analysis of the Cloud Infrastructure of Smart Grid and Internet of Things
Katrin Neubauer, Sebastian Fischer, Rudolf Hackenberg – 2019
Cloud Computing (CC), Internet of Thing (IoT) and Smart Grid (SG) are separate technologies. The digital transformation of the energy industry and the increasing digi- talization in the private sector connect these technologies. At the moment, CC is used as a service provider for IoT. Currently in Germany, the SG is under construction and a cloud connection to the infrastructure has not been implemented yet. To build the SG cloud, the new laws for privacy must be implemented and therefore it’s important to know which data can be stored and distributed over a cloud. In order to be able to use future innovative services, SG and IoT must be combined. For this, in the next step we connect the SG infrastructure with the IoT. A potential insecure device and network (IoT) should be able to transfer data to and from a critical infrastructure (SG). In detail, we focus on two different connections: the communication between the smart meter switching box and the IoT device and the data transferred between the IoT and SG cloud. In our example, a connected charging station with cloud services is connected with a SG infrastructure. To create a really smart service, the charging station needs a connection to the SG to get the current amount of renewable energy in the grid. Private data, such as name, address and payment details, should not be transferred to the IoT cloud. With these two connections, new threads emerge. In this case, availability, confidentiality and integrity must be ensured. A risk analysis over all the cloud connections, including the vulnerability and the ability of an attacker and the resulting risk are developed in this paper.