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

A Survey on Cryptography Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid

A Smart grid is a modern electricity delivery system. It is an integration of energy systems and other necessary elements including traditional upgrades and new grid technologies with renewable generation and increased consumer storage. It uses information and communication technology (ICT) to operate, monitor and control data between the generation source and the end user. Smart grids have duplex power flow and communication to achieve high efficiency, reliability, environmental, economics, security and safety standards. However, along with unique facilities, smart grids face security challenges such as access control, connectivity, fault tolerance, privacy, and other security issues. Cyber-attacks, in the recent past, on critical infrastructure including smart grids have highlighted security as a major requirement for smart grids. Therefore, cryptography and key management are necessary for smart grids to become secure and realizable. Key management schemes are processes of key organizational frameworks, distribution, generation, refresh and key storage policies. Currently, several secure schemes, related to key management for smart grid have been proposed to achieve end-to-end secure communication. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and discussion on the current state of the key management of smart grids

Smart Grid based Wireless Communication in 5G Network for Monitoring and Control Systems in Renewable Energy Management

Wireless networks are becoming ubiquitous and as the cost of equipment decreases and performance increases, it becomes both economically and technologically feasible to deploy wireless networks in power systems and industrial environments for a wide range of applications. They have advantage of providing diverse controlling features through a unified communication platform. Application of such networks in the smart grid/industrial environments is under active research and expected to become an integral part of the power system. This research propose novel technique smart grid communication in wireless 5G networks for monitoring and controlling management. Here the smart grid designing has been done based on wireless communication networks. The smart grid network for renewable energy has been controlled using Stackelberg equilibrium based SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) method. The control method based collected data has been monitored for detection of malicious activities in the network using supervised radial basis fuzzy systems. The experimental analysis has been carried out based on control system and network malicious activities. Here the control system based parameters analysed are Scalability of 65%, QoS of 71%, Power consumption of 41%, Network Efficiency of 92%. Then machine learning based malicious activities detection in terms of accuarcy of 96%, network security of 88%, throughput of 94%, Network delay of 41%. Proposed method supports interoperability of multiple types of inverters, is scalable and flexible, and transmits data over a secure communication channel

Special section on smart grids: A hub of interdisciplinary research : IEEE ACCESS Special section editorial smart grids: A hub of interdisciplinary research

International audienceThe smart grid is an important hub of interdisciplinary research where researchers from different areas of science and technology combine their efforts to enhance the traditional electrical power grid. Due to these efforts, the traditional electrical grid is now evolving. The envisioned smart grid will bring social, environmental, ethical, legal and economic benefits. Smart grid systems increasingly involve machine-to-machine communication as well as human-to-human, or simple information retrieval. Thus, the dimensionality of the system is massive. The smart grid is the combination of different technologies, including control system theory, communication networks, pervasive computing , embedded sensing devices, electric vehicles, smart cities, renewable energy sources, Internet of Things, wireless sensor networks, cyber physical systems, and green communication. Due to these diverse activities and significant attention from researchers, education activities in the smart grid area are also growing. The smart grid is designed to replace the traditional electrical power grid. The envisioned smart grid typically consists of three networks: Home Area Networks (HANs), Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs), and Wide Area Networks (WANs). HANs connect the devices within the premises of the consumer and connect smart meters, Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs), and distributed renewable energy sources. NANs connect multiple HANs and communicate the collected information to a network gateway. WANs serve as the communication backbone. Communication technologies play a vital role in the successful operation of smart grid. These communication technologies can be adopted based upon the specific features required by HANs, NANs, and WANs. Both wired and the wireless communication technologies can be used in the smart grid [1]. However, wireless communication technologies are suitable for many smart grid applications due to the continuous development in the wireless research domain. One drawback of wireless communication technologies is the limited availability of radio spectrum. The use of cognitive radio in smart grid communication will be helpful to break the spectrum gridlock through advanced radio design and operating in multiple settings, such as underlay, overlay, and interweave [2]. The smart grid is the combination of diverse sets of facilities and technologies. Thus, the monitoring and control of transmission lines, distribution facilities, energy generation plants, and as well as video monitoring of consumer premises can be conducted through the use of wireless sensor networks [3]–[6]. In remote sites and places where human intervention is not possible, wireless sensor and actuator networks can be useful for the successful smart grid operation [7], [8]. Since wireless sensor networks operate on the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band, the spectrum might get congested due to overlaid deployment of wireless sensor networks in the same premises. Thus, to deal with this spectrum congestion challenge, cognitive radio sensor networks can be used in smart grid environments [9], [10]. The objective of this Special Section in IEEE ACCESS is to showcase the most recent advances in the interdisciplinary research areas encompassing the smart grid. This Special Section brings together researchers from diverse fields and specializations, such as communications engineering, computer science, electrical and electronics engineering, educators, mathematicians and specialists in areas related to smart grids. In this Special Section, we invited researchers from academia, industry, and government to discuss challenging ideas, novel research contributions, demonstration results, and standardization efforts on the smart grid and related areas. This Special Section is a collection of eleven articles. These articles are grouped into the following four areas: (a) Reliability, security, and privacy for smart grid, (b), Demand response management, understanding customer behavior, and social networking applications for smart grid, (c) Smart cities, renewable energy, and green smart grid, and (d) Communication technologies, control and management for the smart grid

Efficient Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid

With the increasing digitization of different components of Smart Grid by incorporating smart(er) devices, there is an ongoing effort to deploy them for various applications. However, if these devices are compromised, they can reveal sensitive information from such systems. Therefore, securing them against cyber-attacks may represent the first step towards the protection of the critical infrastructure. Nevertheless, realization of the desirable security features such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication relies entirely on cryptographic keys that can be either symmetric or asymmetric. A major need, along with this, is to deal with managing these keys for a large number of devices in Smart Grid. While such key management can be easily addressed by transferring the existing protocols to Smart Grid domain, this is not an easy task, as one needs to deal with the limitations of the current communication infrastructures and resource-constrained devices in Smart Grid. In general, effective mechanisms for Smart Grid security must guarantee the security of the applications by managing (1) key revocation; and (2) key exchange. Moreover, such management should be provided without compromising the general performance of the Smart Grid applications and thus needs to incur minimal overhead to Smart Grid systems. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by proposing specialized key management techniques for resource and communication constrained Smart Grid environments. Specifically, motivated by the need of reducing the revocation management overhead, we first present a distributed public key revocation management scheme for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) by utilizing distributed hash trees (DHTs). The basic idea is to enable sharing of the burden among smart meters to reduce the overall overhead. Second, we propose another revocation management scheme by utilizing cryptographic accumulators, which reduces the space requirements for revocation information significantly. Finally, we turn our attention to symmetric key exchange problem and propose a 0-Round Trip Time (RTT) message exchange scheme to minimize the message exchanges. This scheme enables a lightweight yet secure symmetric key-exchange between field devices and the control center in Smart Gird by utilizing a dynamic hash chain mechanism. The evaluation of the proposed approaches show that they significantly out-perform existing conventional approaches

The Impact of Stealthy Attacks on Smart Grid Performance: Tradeoffs and Implications

The smart grid is envisioned to significantly enhance the efficiency of energy consumption, by utilizing two-way communication channels between consumers and operators. For example, operators can opportunistically leverage the delay tolerance of energy demands in order to balance the energy load over time, and hence, reduce the total operational cost. This opportunity, however, comes with security threats, as the grid becomes more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In this paper, we study the impact of such malicious cyber-attacks on the energy efficiency of the grid in a simplified setup. More precisely, we consider a simple model where the energy demands of the smart grid consumers are intercepted and altered by an active attacker before they arrive at the operator, who is equipped with limited intrusion detection capabilities. We formulate the resulting optimization problems faced by the operator and the attacker and propose several scheduling and attack strategies for both parties. Interestingly, our results show that, as opposed to facilitating cost reduction in the smart grid, increasing the delay tolerance of the energy demands potentially allows the attacker to force increased costs on the system. This highlights the need for carefully constructed and robust intrusion detection mechanisms at the operator.Comment: Technical report - this work was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2016. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1209.176

Models of leader elections and their applications

New research about cyber-physical systems is rapidly changing the way we think about critical infrastructures such as the power grid. Changing requirements for the generation, storage, and availability of power are all driving the development of the smart-grid. Many smart-grid projects disperse power generation across a wide area and control devices with a distributed system. However, in a distributed system, the state of processes is hard to determine due to isolation of memory. By using information flow security models, we reason about a process\u27s beliefs of the system state in a distributed system. Information flow analysis aided in the creation of Markov models for the expected behavior of a cyber controller in a smart-grid system using a communication network with omission faults. The models were used as part of an analysis of the distributed system behavior when there are communication faults. With insight gained from these models, existing congestion management techniques were extended to create a feedback mechanism, allowing the cyber-physical system to better react to issues in the communication network --Abstract, page iii

SECURING THE INTEGRITY OF THE POWER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM FOR SMART GRID APPLICATIONS

The distribution system is one of the main components in a smart grid, readings are transferred from the distribution substations to the control center. Compromising transferred system data will result in drawing wrong conclusions about current operation status at the control center. Which leads to sending wrong operational commands that may result in very serious consequences. Firstly, we propose a scalable communications architecture for future smart grid distribution systems (i.e. Security Aware Distribution System Architecture - SADSA). The architecture is adaptable to use Wi-Fi or other technologies to transfer smart grid information. The architecture is studied from various angles. Both communication and cybersecurity challenges are extracted. In addition, the work provides a detailed discussion on how the proposed architecture meets National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity requirements for smart grids. Secondly, we propose the False Data Injection Prevention Protocol - FDIPP, the protocol prevents packet injection, duplication, alteration and node replication. In other words, it guarantees both system and data integrity. The protocol was analyzed using formal security analysis. Furthermore, Network Simulator 2 is used to evaluate both SADSA and FDIPP. The simulation is used to measure the delay and security overhead introduced from FDIPP and the proposed architectur