A lightweight defense scheme for industrial data transmission against eavesdropping attacks and integrity attacks

Malicious external attackers have been targeting the vulnerabilities in the network-involved industrial control systems such as the smart grids. The happening of several real-world attack events and the possibility of concealed integrity attacks revealed by recent literature are fostering the safety and security experts to pay attention to the dependability of the measurement data after network transmission. Aiming at this, this paper proposes a lightweight data masking/encryption scheme to protect the industrial measurements from being eaves-dropped during network transmissions. At the receiver's end, the measurements are reconstructed using an offline designed decryptor. These data are dependable for subsequent uses in the condition that the attack detection indicators are below the threshold. This proposed scheme is theoretically supported by the correlation relationship between the variables. The confidentiality can be guaranteed because an essential part of the information for solving the reconstruction matrix is never accessible to the attackers. Simulation results on a two-area load frequency control power grid system demonstrate the correctness of the theories and show the applicability of the proposed scheme.