Lightweight Cryptography-Based Secure Data Communication for Solar Photovoltaic Power Plants
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The increasing deployment of grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants has led to extensive use of networked sensors, smart inverters, and supervisory control systems for real-time monitoring and control. While this digitalization improves operational efficiency, it also exposes PV plants to cyber threats such as eavesdropping, data tampering, replay attacks, and false data injection. Conventional cryptographic mechanisms often impose significant computational, memory, and energy overhead on resource-constrained field devices, limiting their suitability for large-scale solar installations. This paper proposes a lightweight cryptography-based security framework for protecting data communication in solar PV power plants. The proposed system integrates standardized authenticated encryption with associated data to provide confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and replay protection for sensor and inverter telemetry without affecting real-time operation. A cyber-physical system architecture and threat model tailored to PV plants are presented, followed by the design and implementation of the proposed secure communication scheme. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves substantially lower end-to-end latency, reduced energy consumption, and a smaller memory footprint compared to conventional AES-based security, making it well-suited for embedded and inverter-centric PV environments. The proposed framework enhances the cyber resilience of solar power plants, supporting secure, scalable, and real-time integration of renewable energy.
Institutions: DES Pune University, Savitribai Phule Pune University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7204944193