Cybercrime and Risks for Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) is the integration of computation and physical systems that make a complete system such as the network, software, embedded systems, and physical components. Major industries such as industrial plants, transport, national grid, and communication systems depend heavily on CPS for financial and economic growth. However, these components may have inherent threats and vulnerabilities on them that may run the risk of being attacked, manipulated or exploited by cyber attackers and commit cybercrimes. Cybercriminals in their quest to bring down these systems may cause disruption of services either for fame, data theft, revenge, political motive, economic war, cyber terrorism, and cyberwar. Therefore, identifying the risks has become imperative in mitigating the cybercrimes. This paper seeks to identify cybercrimes and risks that are associated with a smart grid business application system to determine the motives and intents of the cybercriminal. The paper identified four goals to mitigate the risks: as business value, organizational requirements, threat agent and impact vectors. We used the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the importance of the goals that contribute to identifying cybercrime and risks in CPS. For the results, a case study is used to identify the threat and vulnerable spots and the prioritized goals are then used to assess the risks using a semi-quantitative approach to determine the net threat level. The results indicate that using the AHP approach to identify cybercrime and risk on CPS provides specific risk mitigation goals

CPS Attacks Mitigation Approaches on Power Electronic Systems with Security Challenges for Smart Grid Applications: A Review

This paper presents an inclusive review of the cyber-physical (CP) attacks, vulnerabilities, mitigation approaches on the power electronics and the security challenges for the smart grid applications. With the rapid evolution of the physical systems in the power electronics applications for interfacing renewable energy sources that incorporate with cyber frameworks, the cyber threats have a critical impact on the smart grid performance. Due to the existence of electronic devices in the smart grid applications, which are interconnected through communication networks, these networks may be subjected to severe cyber-attacks by hackers. If this occurs, the digital controllers can be physically isolated from the control loop. Therefore, the cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in the power electronic systems employed in the smart grid need special treatment and security. In this paper, an overview of the power electronics systems security on the networked smart grid from the CP perception, as well as then emphases on prominent CP attack patterns with substantial influence on the power electronics components operation along with analogous defense solutions. Furthermore, appraisal of the CPS threats attacks mitigation approaches, and encounters along the smart grid applications are discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with upcoming trends and challenges in CP security in the smart grid applications

Reliability Analysis of Electric Power Systems Considering Cyber Security

The new generation of the electric power system is the modern smart grid which is essentially a cyber and physical system (CPS). Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)/energy management system (EMS) is the key component of CPS, which is becoming the main target of both external and insider cyberattacks. Cybersecurity of the SCADA/EMS system is facing big challenges and influences the reliability of the electric power system. Characteristics of cyber threats will impact the system reliability. System reliability can be influenced by various cyber threats with different attack skill levels and attack paths. Additionally, the change of structure of the target system may also result in the change of the system reliability. However, very limited research is related to the reliability analysis of the electric power system considering cybersecurity issue. A large amount of mathematical methods can be used to quantify the cyber threats and simulation processes can be applied to build the reliability analysis model. For instance, to analyze the vulnerabilities of the SCADA/EMS system in the electric power system, Bayesian Networks (BNs) can be used to model the attack paths of cyberattacks on the exploited vulnerabilities. The mean time-to-compromise (MTTC) and mean time-to-failure (MTTF) based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) can be applied to characterize the properties of cyberattacks. What’s more, simulation approaches like non-sequential or sequential Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) is able to simulate the system reliability analysis and calculate the reliability indexes. In this thesis, reliability of the SCADA/EMS system in the electric power system considering different cybersecurity issues is analyzed. The Bayesian attack path models of cyberattacks on the SCADA/EMS components are built by Bayesian Networks (BNs), and cyberattacks are quantified by its mean time-to-compromise (MTTC) by applying a modified Semi-Markov Process (SMP) and MTTC models. Based on the IEEE Reliability Test System (RTS) 96, the system reliability is analyzed by calculating the electric power system reliability indexes like LOLP and EENS through MCS. What’s more, cyberattacks with different lurking strategies are considered and analyzed. According to the simulation results, it shows that the system reliability of the SCADA/EMS system in the electric power system considering cyber security is closely related to the MTTC of cyberattacks, which is influenced by the attack paths, attacking skill levels, and the complexity of the target structure. With the increase of the MTTC values of cyberattacks, LOLP values decrease, which means that the reliability of the system is better, and the system is safer. In addition, with the difficulty level of lurking strategies of cyberattacks getting higher and higher, though the LOLP values of scenarios don’t increase a lot, the EENS values of the corresponding scenarios increase dramatically, which indicates that the system reliability is more unpredictable, and the cyber security is worse. Finally, insider attacks are discussed and corresponding LOLP values and EENS values considering lurking behavior are estimated and compared. Both LOLP and EENS values dramatically increase owing to the insider attacks that result in the lower MTTCs. This indicates that insider attacks can lead to worse impact on system reliability than external cyber attacks. The results of this thesis may contribute to the establishment of perfect countermeasures against with cyber attacks on the electric power system

Security risks in cyber physical systems—A systematic mapping study

The increased need for constant connectivity and complete automation of existing systems fuels the popularity of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) worldwide. Increasingly more, these systems are subjected to cyber attacks. In recent years, many major cyber-attack incidents on CPS have been recorded and, in turn, have been raising concerns in their users' minds. Unlike in traditional IT systems, the complex architecture of CPS consisting of embedded systems integrated with the Internet of Things (IoT) requires rather extensive planning, implementation, and monitoring of security requirements. One crucial step to planning, implementing, and monitoring of these requirements in CPS is the integration of the risk management process in the CPS development life cycle. Existing studies do not clearly portray the extent of damage that the unattended security issues in CPS can cause or have caused, in the incidents recorded. An overview of the possible risk management techniques that could be integrated into the development and maintenance of CPS contributing to improving its security level in its actual environment is missing. In this paper, we are set out to highlight the security requirements and issues specific to CPS that are discussed in scientific literature and to identify the state-of-the-art risk management processes adopted to identify, monitor, and control those security issues in CPS. For that, we conducted a systematic mapping study on the data collected from 312 papers published between 2000 and 2020, focused on the security requirements, challenges, and the risk management processes of CPS. Our work aims to form an overview of the security requirements and risks in CPS today and of those published contributions that have been made until now, towards improving the reliability of CPS. The results of this mapping study reveal (i) integrity authentication and confidentiality as the most targeted security attributes in CPS, (ii) model-based techniques as the most used risk identification and assessment and management techniques in CPS, (iii) cyber-security as the most common security risk in CPS, (iv) the notion of “mitigation measures” based on the type of system and the underline internationally recognized standard being the most used risk mitigation technique in CPS, (v) smart grids being the most targeted systems by cyber-attacks and thus being the most explored domain in CPS literature, and (vi) one of the major limitations, according to the selected literature, concerns the use of the fault trees for fault representation, where there is a possibility of runtime system faults not being accounted for. Finally, the mapping study draws implications for practitioners and researchers based on the findings.</p

Cyber-Physical Power System (CPPS): A Review on Modelling, Simulation, and Analysis with Cyber Security Applications

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a new kind of digital technology that increases its attention across academia, government, and industry sectors and covers a wide range of applications like agriculture, energy, medical, transportation, etc. The traditional power systems with physical equipment as a core element are more integrated with information and communication technology, which evolves into the Cyber-Physical Power System (CPPS). The CPPS consists of a physical system tightly integrated with cyber systems (control, computing, and communication functions) and allows the two-way flows of electricity and information for enabling smart grid technologies. Even though the digital technologies monitoring and controlling the electric power grid more efficiently and reliably, the power grid is vulnerable to cybersecurity risk and involves the complex interdependency between cyber and physical systems. Analyzing and resolving the problems in CPPS needs the modelling methods and systematic investigation of a complex interaction between cyber and physical systems. The conventional way of modelling, simulation, and analysis involves the separation of physical domain and cyber domain, which is not suitable for the modern CPPS. Therefore, an integrated framework needed to analyze the practical scenario of the unification of physical and cyber systems. A comprehensive review of different modelling, simulation, and analysis methods and different types of cyber-attacks, cybersecurity measures for modern CPPS is explored in this paper. A review of different types of cyber-attack detection and mitigation control schemes for the practical power system is presented in this paper. The status of the research in CPPS around the world and a new path for recommendations and research directions for the researchers working in the CPPS are finally presented.publishedVersio

Cascading Failures and Contingency Analysis for Smart Grid Security

The modern electric power grid has become highly integrated in order to increase the reliability of power transmission from the generating units to end consumers. In addition, today’s power system are facing a rising appeal for the upgrade to a highly intelligent generation of electricity networks commonly known as Smart Grid. However, the growing integration of power system with communication network also brings increasing challenges to the security of modern power grid from both physical and cyber space. Malicious attackers can take advantage of the increased access to the monitoring and control of the system and exploit some of the inherent structural vulnerability of power grids. Therefore, determining the most vulnerable components (e.g., buses or generators or transmission lines) is critically important for power grid defense. This dissertation introduces three different approaches to enhance the security of the smart grid. Motivated by the security challenges of the smart grid, the first goal of this thesis is to facilitate the understanding of cascading failure and blackouts triggered by multi-component attacks, and to support the decision making in the protection of a reliable and secure smart grid. In this work, a new definition of load is proposed by taking power flow into consideration in comparison with the load definition based on degree or network connectivity. Unsupervised learning techniques (e.g., K-means algorithm and self-organizing map (SOM)) are introduced to find the vulnerable nodes and performance comparison is done with traditional load based attack strategy. Second, an electrical distance approach is introduced to find the vulnerable branches during contingencies. A new network structure different than the original topological structure is formed based on impedance matrix which is referred as electrical structure. This structure is pruned to make it size compatible with the topological structure and the common branches between the two different structures are observed during contingency analysis experiments. Simulation results for single and multiple contingencies have been reported and the violation of line limits during single and multiple outages are observed for vulnerability analysis. Finally, a cyber-physical power system (CPS) testbed is introduced as an accurate cyber-physical environment in order to observe the system behavior during malicious attacks and different disturbance scenarios. The application areas and architecture of proposed CPS testbed have been discussed in details. The testbed’s efficacy is then evaluated by conducting real-time cyber attacks and exploring the impact in a physical system. The possible mitigation strategies are suggested for defense against the attack and protect the system from being unstable