Inside IEC 61850: MMS, GOOSE, Sampled Values, and Security
IEC 61850 is another one of those protocols that becomes more interesting the deeper you go.
At first glance, it looks like another industrial protocol to dissect: identify the transport, decode the messages, enumerate the data model, and look for places where authentication or authorization is missing, but that description turns out to be inadequate.
IEC 61850 is an ecosystem of communication models rather than a single protocol. MMS operates over the station bus and provides a comparatively conventional client/server interface. GOOSE and Sampled Values operate directly over Ethernet and introduce an entirely different set of assumptions around multicast, timing, state, sequencing, and data integrity. That difference became the central theme of this research.
I spent several days building an isolated IEC 61850 laboratory around libIEC61850, examining SCL configuration, MMS sessions, control operations, GOOSE, Sampled Values, and process-bus behavior. The work combined packet captures, custom Python tooling, native library examples,...
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