Security of communication protocols in Smart Grids environments.

In the era of digitalization, electrical grids are bound to shift towards an automat- ized architecture. Doing so offers many advantages like real-time data acquisi- tion, distributed management and control, and standardization of the technology, but poses as many different threats: being a critical infrastructure, implement- ing information technology in the electrical grid could open up possibilities for bad actors to perform malicious attacks. This document’s goal is to analyze the communications in the current architecture as defined in standard IEC 61850 by means of different scenarios, analyze the possible attacks in these configurations, and offer possible solutions, taking into account what has been proposed in the literature and in standard IEC 62351. To ensure the feasibility of the proposed solutions, practical experiments have been carried out in testing environments and the results are provided and analyzed.