Secure Self-healing Group Key Distribution Scheme with Constant Storage for SCADA Systems in Smart Grid Tahadray Jean Tsitaitse 1 • Yongquan Cai 1 • Allah Ditta 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Smart grid has a great advantage over the traditional power grid and it is a critical condition in people’s daily life. The security of data communication in smart grid is important and needs to be efficiently guaranteed. The supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems is in charge of supervising the sensitive process. In SCADA systems, the secure communication between control center and remote terminal units can be achieved by the key distribution mechanism. However, the remote terminal units are resource-constrained and sometimes are not available so that they cannot receive the session key updating broadcast. Self-healing is an efficient mechanism to calculate missing session keys by using later broadcast messages. In this paper, we propose an efficient self- healing group key distribution scheme for SCADA systems. The security analysis illus- trates that our scheme satisfy the basic security properties defined in security model. According to the performance evaluation from storage and communication cost view- points, the proposed scheme is efficient. Keywords SCADA systems  Self-healing  Key distribution  Security 1 Introduction Power grid is regarded as a vital component in people’s daily life. If power grid is not very reliable and stable, it will cause some problems, such as inconvenience and even economic loss. Information and communication technology promotes a new paradigm-smart grid. In smart grid, bidirectional communications is adopted and data can be shared easily among different parts of power grid. Thus, power delivery and distribution is more convenient. In electricity distribution process, the control sensitive process data transmission is supervised by the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. The smart grid system & Yongquan Cai caiyongquan11@163.com 1 Computer Science Department, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100191, China 123 Wireless Pers Commun https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-5789-z