QUIC-TRIP: A Triple-Redundant Journey Toward Secure Substation Communications

Abstract

Modern power systems rely on real-time substation communication protocols, such as the Routable Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (R-GOOSE), for critical control and protection functions. However, these protocols often lack built-in security features and prioritize availability over confidentiality and integrity, making them susceptible to false data injection and denial-of-service attacks. This vulnerability is exacerbated when communications are transmitted over wide-area or public networks. Addressing these cyber threats is essential to comply with current security mandates, including the DOE's defense-in-depth and zero-trust guidelines. This paper introduces QUIC-TRIP, a transparent security methodology for low-latency IP-based industrial communications. By operating at the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Transport Layer (Layer 4), the solution encapsulates and protects data flows without affecting the operation of existing protocol endpoints. Baseline echo Round-Trip Time (RTT) results over a Frankfurt-Amsterdam communication path show that the underlying transport-layer proxy used by QUIC-TRIP achieves a lower average RTT than OpenVPN and only 2.88% higher average RTT than integrated DTLS 1.2, even with DTLS session reuse. We evaluate the resilience of QUIC-TRIP multipath communication under DoS flooding by securing R-GOOSE communications. In these tests, traffic is transparently delivered through three different paths, and QUIC-TRIP forwards the earliest-arriving duplicate while discarding later copies. The framework provides a triple-redundant defense scheme with a measured communication overhead of 32.18% per enabled proxied path, offering a bounded trade-off between resilience and bandwidth cost for time-critical grid operations.