Impact Assessment of Hypothesized Cyberattacks on Interconnected Bulk Power Systems

The first-ever Ukraine cyberattack on power grid has proven its devastation by hacking into their critical cyber assets. With administrative privileges accessing substation networks/local control centers, one intelligent way of coordinated cyberattacks is to execute a series of disruptive switching executions on multiple substations using compromised supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. These actions can cause significant impacts to an interconnected power grid. Unlike the previous power blackouts, such high-impact initiating events can aggravate operating conditions, initiating instability that may lead to system-wide cascading failure. A systemic evaluation of "nightmare" scenarios is highly desirable for asset owners to manage and prioritize the maintenance and investment in protecting their cyberinfrastructure. This survey paper is a conceptual expansion of real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, impact analyses, and mitigation (RAIM) framework that emphasizes on the resulting impacts, both on steady-state and dynamic aspects of power system stability. Hypothetically, we associate the combinatorial analyses of steady state on substations/components outages and dynamics of the sequential switching orders as part of the permutation. The expanded framework includes (1) critical/noncritical combination verification, (2) cascade confirmation, and (3) combination re-evaluation. This paper ends with a discussion of the open issues for metrics and future design pertaining the impact quantification of cyber-related contingencies

A Survey of Protocol-Level Challenges and Solutions for Distributed Energy Resource Cyber-Physical Security

The increasing proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) on the smart grid has made distributed solar and wind two key contributors to the expanding attack surface of the network; however, there is a lack of proper understanding and enforcement of DER communications security requirements. With vendors employing proprietary methods to mitigate hosts of attacks, the literature currently lacks a clear organization of the protocol-level vulnerabilities, attacks, and solutions mapped to each layer of the logical model such as the OSI stack. To bridge this gap and pave the way for future research by the authors in determining key DER security requirements, this paper conducts a comprehensive review of the key vulnerabilities, attacks, and potential solutions for solar and wind DERs at the protocol level. In doing so, this paper serves as a starting point for utilities, vendors, aggregators, and other industry stakeholders to develop a clear understanding of the DER security challenges and solutions, which are key precursors to comprehending security requirements

Design Considerations for Building Credible Security Testbeds : A Systematic Study of Industrial Control System Use Cases

This paper presents a mapping framework for design factors and implementation process for building credible Industrial Control Systems (ICS) security testbeds. The resilience of ICSs has become a critical concern to operators and governments following widely publicised cyber security events. The inability to apply conventional Information Technology security practice to ICSs further compounds challenges in adequately securing critical systems. To overcome these challenges, and do so without impacting live environments, testbeds for the exploration, development and evaluation of security controls are widely used. However, how a testbed is designed and its attributes, can directly impact not only its viability but also its credibility as a whole. Through a combined systematic and thematic analysis and mapping of ICS security testbed design attributes, this paper suggests that the expertise of human experimenters, design objectives, the implementation approach, architectural coverage, core characteristics, and evaluation methods; are considerations that can help establish or enhance confidence, trustworthiness and acceptance; thus, credibility of ICS security testbeds

Evaluation of Security Availability of Data Components for A Renewable Energy Micro Smart Grid System

In this thesis, we study the development and security testing of photovoltaic data collection system. With the introduction of the smart grid concept, a lot of research has been done on the communication aspect of energy production and distribution throughout the power network. For Smart Grid, Internet is used as the communication medium for specific required services and for data collection. Despite all the advantages of the Smart Grid infrastructure, there is also some security concern regarding the vulnerabilities associated with internet access. In this thesis, we consider security testing of the two most popular and globally deployed web server platforms Apache running on Red Had Linux 5 and IIS on Windows Server 2008, and their performance under Distributed Denial of Service Attacks. Furthermore we stress test the data collection services provided by MySQL running on both Windows and Linux Servers when it is also under DDoS attacks

Design Considerations for Building Credible Security Testbeds: Perspectives from Industrial Control System Use Cases

This paper presents a mapping framework for design factors and an implementation process for building credible Industrial Control Systems (ICS) security testbeds. The security and resilience of ICSs has become a critical concern to operators and governments following widely publicised cyber security events. The inability to apply conventional Information Technology security practice to ICSs further compounds challenges in adequately securing critical systems. To overcome these challenges, and do so without impacting live environments, testbeds are widely used for the exploration, development, and evaluation of security controls. However, how a testbed is designed and its attributes, can directly impact not only its viability but also its credibility. Combining systematic and thematic analysis, and the mapping of identified ICS security testbed design attributes, we propose a novel relationship map of credibility-supporting design factors (and their associated attributes) and a process implementation flow structure for ICS security testbeds. The framework and implementation process highlight the significance of demonstrating some design factors such as user/experimenter expertise, clearly defined testbed design objectives, simulation implementation approach, covered architectural components, core structural and functional characteristics covered, and evaluations to enhance confidence, trustworthiness and acceptance of ICS security testbeds as credible. These can streamline testbed requirement definition, improve design consistency and quality while reducing implementation costs