Verification-based data integrity mechanism in smart grid network

The integration of open communication infrastructures and bidirectional communication between smart metres and utilities in smart grids is very important to support vast amounts of data exchange. It also increases the openness and opportunity of resource sharing across smart grid users, which makes the network vulnerable to several cyber-attacks. These cyber-attacks target smart metres data integrity through several known threats. The most known threats are false data injection (FDI) attacks that manipulate, modify or destroy data by some malicious users. Therefore, these attacks make the smart metres behave maliciously to return false data and to sabotage the system functions. In this paper, we propose a new approach to improve the integrity of data generated by smart metres in a smart grid, namely, verificationbased data integrity mechanism (VBDIM). The performance of our approach is evaluated through simulation to investigate the effects of collusive smart metres on the correctness of their generated data. The obtained results show that our approach achieves a lower blacklisting error and error-rate, and better performance in terms of overhead and slowdown. © 2021 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.. All rights reserved.