Key Pre-distribution Scheme with Join Leave Support for SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are used in major industries to achieve greater levels of efficiency, safety and quality. Due to massive security attacks, securing such systems is a critical issue. In order to secure the communications of SCADA systems, it is observed that key pre-distribution schemes are more suitable. In this paper, we propose a matrix- based key pre-distribution scheme for SCADA systems. The scheme supports device join, leave and key update operations with less communication cost. Also, the proposed key pre-distribution scheme supports secure broadcasting, multi-casting and unicast communications between the SCADA systems. In this novel approach, secret keys are not transmitted over the network to handle the operations, such as key update, join and leave. Alternatively, each device locally computes the required keys, once they are deployed in the network. However, in these situations that the device compromises or supports forward secrecy, the auxiliary and group keys are encrypted and sent to the required devices. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme from both performance and security perspectives, it is compared with existing schemes through simulation results and analyzing the findings.© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.