2,655 research outputs found
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
Alpha Entanglement Codes: Practical Erasure Codes to Archive Data in Unreliable Environments
Data centres that use consumer-grade disks drives and distributed
peer-to-peer systems are unreliable environments to archive data without enough
redundancy. Most redundancy schemes are not completely effective for providing
high availability, durability and integrity in the long-term. We propose alpha
entanglement codes, a mechanism that creates a virtual layer of highly
interconnected storage devices to propagate redundant information across a
large scale storage system. Our motivation is to design flexible and practical
erasure codes with high fault-tolerance to improve data durability and
availability even in catastrophic scenarios. By flexible and practical, we mean
code settings that can be adapted to future requirements and practical
implementations with reasonable trade-offs between security, resource usage and
performance. The codes have three parameters. Alpha increases storage overhead
linearly but increases the possible paths to recover data exponentially. Two
other parameters increase fault-tolerance even further without the need of
additional storage. As a result, an entangled storage system can provide high
availability, durability and offer additional integrity: it is more difficult
to modify data undetectably. We evaluate how several redundancy schemes perform
in unreliable environments and show that alpha entanglement codes are flexible
and practical codes. Remarkably, they excel at code locality, hence, they
reduce repair costs and become less dependent on storage locations with poor
availability. Our solution outperforms Reed-Solomon codes in many disaster
recovery scenarios.Comment: The publication has 12 pages and 13 figures. This work was partially
supported by Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF Doc.Mobility 162014, 2018
48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and
Networks (DSN
Generating Property-Directed Potential Invariants By Backward Analysis
This paper addresses the issue of lemma generation in a k-induction-based
formal analysis of transition systems, in the linear real/integer arithmetic
fragment. A backward analysis, powered by quantifier elimination, is used to
output preimages of the negation of the proof objective, viewed as unauthorized
states, or gray states. Two heuristics are proposed to take advantage of this
source of information. First, a thorough exploration of the possible
partitionings of the gray state space discovers new relations between state
variables, representing potential invariants. Second, an inexact exploration
regroups and over-approximates disjoint areas of the gray state space, also to
discover new relations between state variables. k-induction is used to isolate
the invariants and check if they strengthen the proof objective. These
heuristics can be used on the first preimage of the backward exploration, and
each time a new one is output, refining the information on the gray states. In
our context of critical avionics embedded systems, we show that our approach is
able to outperform other academic or commercial tools on examples of interest
in our application field. The method is introduced and motivated through two
main examples, one of which was provided by Rockwell Collins, in a
collaborative formal verification framework.Comment: In Proceedings FTSCS 2012, arXiv:1212.657
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An Assessment of PIER Electric Grid Research 2003-2014 White Paper
This white paper describes the circumstances in California around the turn of the 21st century that led the California Energy Commission (CEC) to direct additional Public Interest Energy Research funds to address critical electric grid issues, especially those arising from integrating high penetrations of variable renewable generation with the electric grid. It contains an assessment of the beneficial science and technology advances of the resultant portfolio of electric grid research projects administered under the direction of the CEC by a competitively selected contractor, the University of California’s California Institute for Energy and the Environment, from 2003-2014
Fault tolerant architectures for integrated aircraft electronics systems, task 2
The architectural basis for an advanced fault tolerant on-board computer to succeed the current generation of fault tolerant computers is examined. The network error tolerant system architecture is studied with particular attention to intercluster configurations and communication protocols, and to refined reliability estimates. The diagnosis of faults, so that appropriate choices for reconfiguration can be made is discussed. The analysis relates particularly to the recognition of transient faults in a system with tasks at many levels of priority. The demand driven data-flow architecture, which appears to have possible application in fault tolerant systems is described and work investigating the feasibility of automatic generation of aircraft flight control programs from abstract specifications is reported
Evolution of maintenance strategies in oil and gas industries: the present achievements and future trends
Engineering Systems maintenance and reliability challenges have drawn serious attention of researchers and industrialists all over the world due to continuous evolution, innovation and complexity of modern technologies deployed in manufacturing and production systems. These systems need very high reliability and availability due to business, mission and safety critical nature of their operations. This paper reviews evolution of systems or equipment maintenance strategies practiced over the years in complex industrial and manufacturing systems such as oil and gas production systems, satellite communication system, spacecraft navigational system, nuclear power plants, etc. The paper also examines the current maintenance and reliability philosophies, their limitations and highlights major breakthroughs and achievements with regards to complex engineering systems maintenance. Intelligent maintenance, a novel approach to complex engineering systems maintenance and reliability sustainment is proposed. The proposed approach reintegrates operation and maintenance phase into system development life cycle, adopts advanced engineering tools and methodology in developing condition-based predictive maintenance, an intelligent maintenance system with resilient, autonomous and adaptive capabilities. Application of Neural network approach to multisensor data fusion for condition-based predictive maintenance system is briefly presented
Feasibility study of PRA for critical infrastructure risk analysis
Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA) has been commonly used by NASA and the nuclear power industry to assess risk since the 1970s. However, PRA is not commonly used to assess risk in networked infrastructure systems such as water, sewer and power systems. Other methods which utilise network models of infrastructure such as random and targeted attack failure analysis, N-k analysis and statistical learning theory are instead used to analyse system performance when a disruption occurs. Such methods have the advantage of being simpler to implement than PRA. This paper explores the feasibility of a full PRA of infrastructure, that is one that analyses all possible scenarios as well as the associated likelihoods and consequences. Such analysis is resource intensive and quickly becomes complex for even small systems. Comparing the previously mentioned more commonly used methods to PRA provides insight into how current practises can be improved, bringing the results closer to those that would be presented from PRA. Although a full PRA of infrastructure systems may not be feasible, PRA should not be discarded. Instead, analysis of such systems should be carried out using the framework of PRA to include vital elements such as scenario likelihood analysis which are often overlooked.publishedVersio
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