Research on distributed cross-domain authentication mechanism for 5G MEC edge network in substation

Abstract

The birth of 5G technology provides the basic network for the electric power industry applications. With the advantages of the large bandwidth, low latency, high mobility, service offload, it gives rise to the substation intelligent robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, distribution gird station monitoring, etc. Considering the openness of the wireless signal and the sensitivity of the power grid equipment information, authentication policies must be designed based on the 5G network architecture to reduce the risk of unauthorized access. This paper proposes a multi-factor authentication mechanism through the secondary authentication framework based on 5G network. The proposed identity authentication factors include trusted identity identification, radio frequency signal characteristics, geographic location information, traffic statistics, etc. The reliability of each factor is calculated in real time through the secondary authentication gateway, and the terminal access legitimacy is analyzed. The access authentication process of substation 5G edge network is designed according to 5G secondary authentication framework to ensure the legitimacy of terminal identity and block suspicious terminals in time. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed distributed cross-domain authentication mechanism is verified by analyzing various attacks.