Cyber security for smart grid - the backbone of social economy

Ever-growing population of people and new electronic gadgets demand huge electricity. Existing power grids mostly use non-renewable energy sources for electricity generation which is unidirectional energy flow. Aging equipments and manual meter reading, power line failure detection and power quality measurements result in lot of power losses and delays. Smart Grid assures modern, computerized and automated electricity power generation, distribution and management. It also ensures energy efficiency with quality improvement and reliability. But since it involves some kind of wired and wireless communication, there are the chances of enormous vulnerabilities. Electricity theft, authentication, authorization, trust ranking, distributed denial of service attack, man in the middle attack are the real challenges for smart grid. Cyber Security should ensure security for smart grid system with appropriate levels of trust, privacy and security. This paper puts forth the security challenges for smart grid and discusses about possible security solutions.