Programmable Crypto-Control for Networked Microgrids

In collaborative networked microgrids (NMs), distributed energy resources (DERs) utilize intelligent IoT-based controllers to support various smart community functions coordinately. Meanwhile, privacy and security issues occur when IoT-based controllers interact with each other. This chapter presents a cryptography-based, programmable control (crypto-control) scheme to provably preserve the privacy of DERs while ensuring fast, flexible distributed control in NMs. Specifically, it makes the following contributions: (1) a programmable crypto-control-based NMs (PCNMs) architecture, where crypto-controllers are fully virtualized, is devised; (2) a novel dynamic encrypted weight addition (DEWA) approach, which integrates an enhanced partial homomorphic encryption and a secret sharing scheme, is devised to ensure privacy preserving of distributed controls; (3) the DEWA privacy-preserving property is mathematically analyzed; and (4) a real-time DEWA-based PCNMs testbed is established in RTDS incorporating DEWA, real software-defined networking switches, and real IoT devices. Experimental results validate the effectiveness, benefits, and superiority of DEWA-based PCNMs, and the inherent system’s resilience is also validated via small signal stability analyses.