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

Abstract

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.