3,382 research outputs found
Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques
SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability
Secure Distributed Dynamic State Estimation in Wide-Area Smart Grids
Smart grid is a large complex network with a myriad of vulnerabilities,
usually operated in adversarial settings and regulated based on estimated
system states. In this study, we propose a novel highly secure distributed
dynamic state estimation mechanism for wide-area (multi-area) smart grids,
composed of geographically separated subregions, each supervised by a local
control center. We firstly propose a distributed state estimator assuming
regular system operation, that achieves near-optimal performance based on the
local Kalman filters and with the exchange of necessary information between
local centers. To enhance the security, we further propose to (i) protect the
network database and the network communication channels against attacks and
data manipulations via a blockchain (BC)-based system design, where the BC
operates on the peer-to-peer network of local centers, (ii) locally detect the
measurement anomalies in real-time to eliminate their effects on the state
estimation process, and (iii) detect misbehaving (hacked/faulty) local centers
in real-time via a distributed trust management scheme over the network. We
provide theoretical guarantees regarding the false alarm rates of the proposed
detection schemes, where the false alarms can be easily controlled. Numerical
studies illustrate that the proposed mechanism offers reliable state estimation
under regular system operation, timely and accurate detection of anomalies, and
good state recovery performance in case of anomalies
Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey
The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to
ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability
issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid
(SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical
power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side
management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will
bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system.
For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time
consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built
on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG
systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue.
Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the
communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey
on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of
SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case
studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for
SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes
applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and
future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte
Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview
The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity networkāthe smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio
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