  Over the past decades, power systems have experienced drastic transformations
in order to address the growth in energy demand, reduce carbon emissions, and
enhance power quality and energy efficiency. This shift to the smart grid
concept involves, among others, the utilization of distributed energy resources
(DERs) such as rooftop solar panels and storage systems, contributing towards
grid decentralization while improving control over power generation. In order
to seamlessly integrate DERs into power systems, embedded devices are used to
support the communication and control functions of DERs. As a result,
vulnerabilities of such components can be ported to the industrial environment.
Insecure control networks and protocols further exacerbate the problem. Towards
reducing the attack surface, we present an authentication scheme for DERs,
DERauth, which leverages the inherent entropy of the DER battery energy storage
system (BESS) as a root-of-trust. The DER authentication is achieved using a
challenge-reply mechanism that relies on the corresponding DER's BESS
state-of-charge (SoC) and voltage measurements. A dynamically updating process
ensures that the BESS state is up-to-date. We evaluate our proof-of-concept in
a prototype development that uses lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries for the BESS.
The robustness of our design is assessed against modeling attacks performed by
neural networks.
