Hardware Signature Extraction from an Intelligent Electronic Device

Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) perform various critical functions like protection and measurements in a power grid. It is essential to identify the IED with a unique signature to ensure the cyber security of the power grid. This paper presents a method to extract the hardware signature from a custom designed IED platform. The analog to digital converter (ADC) and Parallella processor of the IED platform are utilized to obtain the hardware signature. A finite state machine is developed in the Parallella processor to control the ADC to generate different data sets for signature extraction. Using the box and whisker statistical method, transients in the data set are removed and the signature extraction is performed. The proposed method utilizes only a hundred samples of 1kHz data to extract signatures. The long-term repeatability of the developed signature is tested by performing a large number of experiments. It is observed that the extracted signature is repeatable with an allowance for one bit flip. The proposed method is compared with an existing method, demonstrating its ability to generate signatures with fewer data samples.