An overview of authentication protocols for critical infrastructure
Author Identifier (ORCID)
Taylah Griffiths: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2238-9785
Abstract
11 different sectors have been identified as critical within Australia, including the energy and healthcare sectors. Both of the sectors, if damaged, would greatly impact Australia in a negative way. With the rise of smart devices in both the “smart” grid and Internet of Health Things (IoHT), both these sectors have a need for cybersecurity focused technologies. The added pressure for the energy sector is that if these is an attack on the smart grid, the healthcare sector and IoHT devices can be impacted as well. The vulnerabilities on both these sectors include Man-in-the-Middle, Denial of Service (DoS), and False Data Injection (FDI) attacks. A potential solution for these as discussed in the literature is authentication protocols. This paper reviews the authentication protocols as proposed for the smart grid in recent literature. Three different metrics are reviewed, namely, security analysis, trusted analysis, and performance analysis. Security analysis was the papers using logic to outline the attacks that were mitigated with their respective protocols. Trusted analysis was the paper using some software to determine the security of the protocol. Performance analysis was the protocol’s computation, communication, and storage costs. Each protocol was split into its main cryptographic technique (elliptic curve cryptography, physical unclonable functions, biometrics, or blockchain) and tables are used to summarise each section and the metrics used. This chapter finds that the existing metrics used to evaluate authentication protocols are lacking as majority of the papers choose different attacks, software, and performance metrics to review. Future work in this area would create universal metrics to be used in literature to properly evaluate the protocols and include missing metrics such as, accuracy analysis.
Keywords
Smart grid, internet of health things, cybersecurity, authentication protocols, critical infrastructure, cryptographic techniques
Document Type
Book Chapter
Date of Publication
1-1-2025
Publication Title
Cybersecurity for Internet of Health Things
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
School
School of Science
Copyright
subscription content
First Page
95
Last Page
113
Comments
Griffiths, T. (2025). An overview of authentication protocols for critical infrastructure. In Cybersecurity for Internet of Health Things (pp. 95–113). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003483267-8