Lightweight Optimized Message Authentication Scheme for IEC 61850 Sampled Value Messages

The integrity and authenticity of message exchanges in IEC 61850 based automated substations is critical. IEC 62351-6 recommends Message Authentication Code (MAC) based cybersecurity scheme for securing IEC 61850 Sampled Value (SV) and GOOSE messages. This IEC 62351-6 standard-based approach is effective for an Intelligent Electronic Device (IED) that subscribes to a single SV stream. However, for applications where an IED needs to subscribe to multiple SV streams, IEC 62351-6 MAC based technique results in significant computational time overhead. This letter proposes a lightweight optimized security scheme based on quantum secure Blake-2s algorithm for IEC 61850 SV stream. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the computational overhead latency by 56.03% compared to the scheme recommended in IEC 62351-6 standards.