A Study Effective Zigbee Authentication Protocol in Smart Grid Network

Security is critically important for smart grid networks that are usually used for the electric power network and IT environments that are opened to attacks, such as, eavesdropping, replay attacks of abnormal messages, forgery of the messages to name a few. ZigBee has emerged as a strong contender for smart grid networks. ZigBee is used for low data rate and low power wireless network applications. To deploy smart grid networks, the collected information requires protection from an adversary over the network in many cases. The security mechanism should be provided for collecting the information over the network. However, the ZigBee protocol has some security weaknesses. In this paper, these weaknesses are discussed and a method to improve security aspect of the ZigBee protocol is presented along with a comparison of the message complexity of the proposed security protocol with that of the current ZigBee protocol.