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A Lightweight and Post-Quantum Secure Framework for IEC 61869-9 Sampled Value Communication

S. M. Suhail Hussain, Arman Ahmad, Mohammad Tayyab, Shaik Mullapathi Farooq

arXiv:2608.22123v1cs.CReess.SY

TL;DR

IEC 61869-9 SV communication must meet stringent and diverse real-time constraints while resisting quantum-era threats. The paper combines field-selective optimized Chaskey-12 authentication with ML-KEM-based key establishment, and finds the optimized implementation fastest across evaluated profiles, although the 96-kHz profile exceeds its timing margin.

  • Problem

    IEC 61869-9 SV profiles impose diverse real-time constraints, while conventional RSA- and elliptic-curve-based key-management assumptions are vulnerable to sufficiently powerful quantum adversaries.

  • Method

    The framework authenticates only time-varying SV fields with Chaskey-12 and uses ML-KEM-based authentication and key establishment, with QROM analysis and AVISPA verification.

  • Results

    Compiler-optimized Chaskey-12 achieves the lowest authentication time across evaluated profiles, reaching 0.000525 ms for 120-byte inputs and 0.002113 ms for 775-byte profiles.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The framework is feasible on a resource-constrained process-bus platform, while the 96-kHz profile requires additional implementation support to meet its timing constraint.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The 96-kHz, 1-ASDU profile has an approximately 10.4 μs interarrival interval, smaller than the measured total processing delay of 71.93 μs.

Abstract

from arXiv · show

Securing IEC 61869-9 Sampled Values (SV) is challenging because process-bus communication must satisfy stringent real-time constraints while supporting standardized high-rate publication profiles. This paper presents an experimentally validated security framework that combines lightweight per-frame authentication for operational SV traffic with post-quantum-capable key establishment protocol. For message integrity, the proposed method applies field-selective authentication employing optimized Chaskey-12 to reduce per-packet computational overhead. For trust establishment, the paper introduces an ML-KEM-based pairwise authentication and key-establishment procedure. The pairwise protocol is analyzed in the Quantum Random Oracle Model and is also verified with AVISPA tool under the Dolev-Yao adversarial model. A C-based publisher/subscriber prototype is implemented on a two-node process-bus testbed. Performance is evaluated across the eight IEC 61869-9 SV packet profiles using HMAC-256, AES-GMAC-128, Blake-2s, Chaskey-12, and a compiler-optimized Chaskey-12 implementations. These results indicate that optimized Chaskey-12 achieves ~90% lower latency than HMAC on SV packets. The proposed security framework is a practical and scalable candidate for protecting IEC 61869-9 SV traffic on resource-constrained digital-substation devices.

I. INTRODUCTION

IEC 61869-9 modernizes high-rate sampled-value process-bus communication, but its stringent timing and security requirements make lightweight authentication and robust key establishment necessary. The paper combines optimized Chaskey-12 authentication with ML-KEM-based trust establishment and evaluates the integrated framework experimentally.

  • Motivation: IEC 61869-9 standardizes SV publication profiles whose sampling rates and ASDU packing determine packet rates and subscriber interarrival times.These measurements directly drive protection and control decisions, making false SV injection consequential.
  • Contributions: The paper adopts Chaskey-12 and develops a compiler-optimized implementation to reduce execution latency for IEC 61869-9 SV authentication.The design retains symmetric authentication for frequent operational frames rather than using costly per-message signatures.
  • Research gap: Prior SV cryptographic studies emphasized delay and implementation feasibility, while key-establishment, memory, and integrated security analyses were reported less frequently.The paper positions its framework against relevant studies and standards in Table I.
  • Approach: The framework combines lightweight per-frame authentication for operational traffic with post-quantum-capable trust establishment for group-key distribution.Its security treatment includes QROM analysis and AVISPA verification under the Dolev–Yao model.
  • Evaluation: The complete framework is implemented in C and evaluated on a resource-constrained platform for computational delay and memory utilization.The contribution includes a C-based publisher/subscriber prototype and performance evaluation across the standardized SV profiles.

II. BACKGROUND ON IEC 61869-9, IEC 62351-6, AND IEC-62351-9

IEC 61869-9 provides the operative SV evaluation baseline, while IEC 61850-9-2 and 9-2LE establish the communication and deployment context. The eight standardized profiles create different timing and payload trade-offs that the paper evaluates explicitly.

  • Standards context: IEC 61850-9-2 maps sampled values onto multicast Ethernet frames, while 9-2LE constrains that mapping into a realizable multi-vendor process-bus profile.IEC 61869-9 subsequently standardizes the digital interface and SV publication behavior for modern digital substations.
  • SV profiles: IEC 61869-9 defines standardized SV publication profiles in which sampling rate and ASDU packing jointly determine packet rate and interarrival time.The paper uses these profiles as its operative evaluation baseline.
  • Timing trade-offs: Packing multiple ASDUs reduces frame rate and increases interarrival time, but increases per-frame payload and authentication workload.Thus, timing pressure depends on both publication rate and authenticated data size.
  • Timing constraints: One-ASDU profiles impose the highest scheduling pressure, while multi-ASDU profiles provide longer intervals but larger authenticated payloads.Multiple subscribed SV streams further compete for shared IED processing resources.
  • Evaluation scope: The authentication scheme is evaluated across all eight IEC 61869-9 profiles rather than at a single representative operating point.This reflects the profiles’ diverse packet sizes, frame rates, and interarrival times.

ASDUs

IEC 62351-6 frames SV protection around symmetric MAC authentication, while SV periodicity enables field-selective optimization. The paper authenticates changing fields cryptographically and validates invariant stream descriptors separately.

  • Security requirements: IEC 62351-6 targets modification, spoofing, replay, and man-in-the-middle manipulation in time-critical SV and GOOSE traffic.It recognizes the timing and resource constraints of IED-class platforms.
  • Standardized MAC protection: The 2020 revision recommends HMAC-SHA256 and AES-GMAC over a preshared group key for SV and GOOSE messages.Earlier RSA-based signatures were operationally infeasible for high-rate process-bus security because verification took several milliseconds.
  • Authentication procedure: For SV, the authentication value covers the specified message fields and is appended as a security extension; subscribers recompute it and discard mismatches.Additional security fields support key rollover and metadata.
  • Optimization: Periodic SV structure permits authenticating changing sample counters and measurement payloads while checking constant stream fields through cached comparison.This two-stage approach reduces the cryptographic input associated with each frame.

C. IEC 62351-9 Key Management

IEC 62351-9 requires shared group keys for multicast SV authentication, and GDOI supplies them through KDC-mediated authentication and distribution. The paper replaces vulnerable classical trust establishment with ML-KEM while retaining lightweight operational MACs.

  • Key-management need: Symmetric SV authentication requires publishers and subscribers to share a valid group key before protected multicast communication begins.IEC 62351-9 addresses this key-management requirement.
  • GDOI architecture: GDOI uses a KDC-mediated two-phase process: participants are authenticated and authorized, then an operational group key is securely distributed.Each participant receives a unique long-term authentication key used in the distribution phase.
  • Quantum-era concern: Legacy RSA and elliptic-curve trust mechanisms rely on assumptions vulnerable to sufficiently powerful quantum adversaries.This matters for digital-substation assets with long operational lifetimes.
  • Proposed redesign: The paper introduces ML-KEM into the GDOI trust-establishment stage rather than signing every high-rate SV frame.Lightweight symmetric authentication remains responsible for operational SV messages.

III. PROPOSED SECURITY SCHEME

The proposed scheme integrates ML-KEM-based two-party authentication and key establishment with Chaskey-12 authentication for IEC 61869-9 SV communication. It uses ML-KEM-derived keys for trust establishment and group-key distribution, then protects operational SV messages with lightweight MACs.

  • Integrated framework: The framework combines post-quantum ML-KEM authentication and key establishment with Chaskey-12-based operational SV message authentication.These components address secure key establishment and low-latency per-frame authentication as complementary security layers.
  • ML-KEM authentication: ML-KEM replaces the classical first-stage trust-establishment mechanism between the KDC and authorized publisher/subscriber IEDs.The resulting long-term authenticated keys support subsequent group-key distribution through GDOI.
  • Security setting: The protocol is designed for a public, insecure communication channel, with secure channels assumed only during offline registration.The KDC acts as the trusted authority responsible for authentication and session-key establishment.
  • Protocol phases: The protocol comprises system setup, registration, and authentication and key-establishment phases using ML-KEM operations, hashing, and MACs.The KDC publishes its ML-KEM public key, retains the private key and master secret, and registers IED identities through a secure offline channel.
  • Authentication and key establishment: During authentication, the KDC verifies an IED authentication tag, derives a session key, and sends a nonce-bound confirmation tag for independent verification by the IED.The session key is derived from the ML-KEM shared secret, an identity-derived value, and the IED identity.

B. Chaskey-12 Authentication

The operational authentication design selectively authenticates changing SV fields with Chaskey-12 while separately checking invariant stream fields. Its security analysis models the protocol in the QROM through a sequence of game transformations.

  • Design rationale: The selective-field strategy is adopted from prior work rather than claimed as a new contribution, while this paper contributes a compiler-optimized Chaskey-12 implementation.The optimization is motivated by strict SV interarrival constraints and the need for lightweight operational authentication.
  • Chaskey-12 Authentication: The field-selective MAC authenticates only the dynamic SV fields smpCnt and seqData with a 128-bit Chaskey-12 tag.Invariant fields such as APPID, svID, noASDU, confRev, and synchronization indicators are validated through cached comparison.
  • Chaskey-12 Authentication: The subscriber discards a frame immediately when the recomputed tag mismatches, and checks cached static fields only after successful MAC verification.This two-stage process avoids repeated MAC computation over invariant message content.
  • QROM analysis: The QROM analysis treats hash functions as quantum random oracles accessible to a quantum polynomial-time adversary.The model is used for post-quantum analysis of protocols relying on hash functions and ML-KEM.
  • QROM analysis: The game sequence eliminates authentication forgery, replaces the ML-KEM shared secret with a random string, and programs the random oracle while bounding each transition negligibly.The final game makes the session key independent of the protocol execution, yielding adversarial guessing probability 1/2.

B. Security Analysis Using AVISPA tool

The proposed protocol was formally verified with AVISPA under the Dolev–Yao threat model using both OFMC and ATSE back ends. Both analyses returned SAFE results for the specified security goals.

  • B. Security Analysis Using AVISPA tool: AVISPA analyzed the HLPSL-specified protocol with the On-the-Fly Model Checker and Automated Tree Search Engine back ends.The verification used the Dolev–Yao adversarial model.
  • B. Security Analysis Using AVISPA tool: Both AVISPA back ends returned “SAFE,” confirming the specified secrecy and authentication goals within the considered adversarial model.The reported goals include resistance to replay and man-in-the-middle attacks.

V. EXPERIMENTAL IMPLEMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

The evaluation examines the proposed security framework from algorithm-level and implementation-level perspectives across the standardized IEC 61869-9 SV packet profiles.

  • V. EXPERIMENTAL IMPLEMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION: The evaluation covers both algorithm-level and implementation-level performance across the IEC 61869-9 SV packet profiles summarized in Table II.The section frames the assessment around the standardized packet-profile set.

A. Implementation and Benchmarking Setup

The framework was implemented on a two-node Raspberry Pi process-bus testbed and benchmarked for MAC latency, memory, and ML-KEM operations across standardized SV profiles.

  • Testbed: A C-based prototype used two Raspberry Pi nodes as SV publisher and subscriber, with a terminal PC emulating the KDC.The nodes were interconnected through a Layer-2 Ethernet switch.
  • Benchmarking procedure: The MAC benchmark used a PREEMPT_RT kernel, locked memory, real-time scheduling, warm-up execution, and 100,000 repetitions per profile.Average wall-clock time and resident memory were reported.
  • MAC results: For 120-byte profiles, compiler-optimized Chaskey-12 required 0.000525 ms, versus 0.009784 ms for HMAC-256, while using 2200-2204 KB VmRSS.The lightweight implementations reduced both latency and resident memory relative to the HMAC-256 and AES-GMAC-256 baselines.
  • MAC results: For 775-byte profiles, compiler-optimized Chaskey-12 required 0.002113 ms and was approximately 5.9 times faster than HMAC-256.Chaskey-12 remained the fastest alternative as multi-ASDU payload size increased.
  • Memory results: HMAC-256 and AES-GMAC-256 used 9280 KB and 9416 KB VmRSS, whereas Blake-2s and Chaskey-12 remained near 2200-2204 KB.The reported results identify compiler-optimized Chaskey-12 as providing the best latency-memory tradeoff.
  • ML-KEM benchmarking: ML-KEM-512, ML-KEM-768, and ML-KEM-1024 were benchmarked for key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation using liboqs.The measurements evaluated post-quantum key-establishment overhead on the experimental platform.

C. Publisher-Side Processing Delay Against IEC 61869-9

Publisher-side processing met the available interarrival-time budgets for seven of eight IEC 61869-9 profiles on the evaluated resource-constrained platform; the 96-kHz profile was the exception.

  • Within-budget profiles: 71.93 μs total processing delay remained below the interarrival times for the 4000-Hz, 4800-Hz, and 5760-Hz 1-ASDU profiles.The corresponding interarrival times were 250 μs, ~208 μs, and ~173.6 μs.
  • Within-budget profiles: 84.27 μs, 126.01 μs, and 151.79 μs remained within the budgets for the 4800-Hz 2-ASDU, 14400-Hz 6-ASDU, and 12800-Hz / 15360-Hz 8-ASDU profiles.These results support feasibility for the listed standardized profiles on the evaluated platform.
  • Exception: The 96000-Hz, 1-ASDU profile had an approximately 10.4 μs interarrival interval, below the measured 71.93 μs total processing delay.The paper identifies hardware assistance, stronger real-time optimization, parallel processing, or dedicated IED hardware as possible support.

VI. CONCLUSION

The paper concludes that its integrated framework combines lightweight SV authentication with post-quantum-capable key establishment and is feasible for most standardized profiles on constrained hardware.

  • Framework: Field-selective authentication protects time-varying SV fields cryptographically while validating static stream fields through cached comparison.Chaskey-12 supplies the MAC primitive, alongside ML-KEM-based two-party authentication and key establishment.
  • Security validation: QROM analysis and AVISPA verification confirmed the specified secrecy and authentication goals for the key-establishment protocol.AVISPA used the OFMC and ATSE back ends.
  • Experimental conclusion: The prototype satisfied interarrival-time constraints for all evaluated profiles except the 96-kHz, 1-ASDU case.Compiler-optimized Chaskey-12 had the lowest authentication time across evaluated packet profiles while maintaining a compact memory footprint.
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