Smart Meter Development Using Digital Twin Technology for Green Energy Distribution Optimization

This study proposes a digital twin (DT) approach and technical framework for smart meters to solve potential implementation and development problems and adapt to the new energy revolution trend and increase smart grid network security. DT models were deployed in the cloud and edge using a smart meter DT demonstration system. This paper evaluates the DT system's communication performance in real-time smart grid application through three dimensions: remote application service for smart grid user side, P2P transaction on the user side, and user real-time request service. This study's container-based decision tree strategy for smart meters meets the smart grid's real-time communication requirements for user-side applications

Modelling for Improved Cyber Security in Smart Distribution System

Information technology is the backbone of the smart grid, where all networks like generation, transmission, distribution, and customer components are connected to each other. Connectivity between these components offers many advantages including consumer�s ability to manage their electricity consumption rates and electricity bills etc. Smart grid also provides operators great extent of system visibility and control over electricity services, supervision and control of generating units, power quality improvements and reduced fuel cost etc. Highly connected infrastructure in smart grid threats the reliable operation of grid, especially in terms of cyber security. In automated system, where control actions can be generated by a single command even from a great distance may lead complete shutdown of the whole system. Failure/disoperation of power service suspends all critical services. Therefore, the electrical grid becomes the most significant target for acts of vandalism and terrorism. So an extensive security against the cyber-attacks is required in smart grid environment as compare to traditional electricity grid, where almost all control actions were taken manually or with little use of local controllers. Therefore, with control atomization modulation of traditional energy supply system into a smart network requires a huge investment to develop security strategies as a safeguard for this critical infrastructure

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

Vulnerability Assessment and Privacy-preserving Computations in Smart Grid

Modern advances in sensor, computing, and communication technologies enable various smart grid applications which highlight the vulnerability that requires novel approaches to the field of cybersecurity. While substantial numbers of technologies have been adopted to protect cyber attacks in smart grid, there lacks a comprehensive review of the implementations, impacts, and solutions of cyber attacks specific to the smart grid.In this dissertation, we are motivated to evaluate the security requirements for the smart grid which include three main properties: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. First, we review the cyber-physical security of the synchrophasor network, which highlights all three aspects of security issues. Taking the synchrophasor network as an example, we give an overview of how to attack a smart grid network. We test three types of attacks and show the impact of each attack consisting of denial-of-service attack, sniffing attack, and false data injection attack.Next, we discuss how to protect against each attack. For protecting availability, we examine possible defense strategies for the associated vulnerabilities.For protecting data integrity, a small-scale prototype of secure synchrophasor network is presented with different cryptosystems. Besides, a deep learning based time-series anomaly detector is proposed to detect injected measurement. Our approach observes both data measurements and network traffic features to jointly learn system states and can detect attacks when state vector estimator fails.For protecting data confidentiality, we propose privacy-preserving algorithms for two important smart grid applications. 1) A distributed privacy-preserving quadratic optimization algorithm to solve Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF) problem. The SCOPF problem is decomposed into small subproblems using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and gradient projection algorithms. 2) We use Paillier cryptosystem to secure the computation of the power system dynamic simulation. The IEEE 3-Machine 9-Bus System is used to implement and demonstrate the proposed scheme. The security and performance analysis of our implementations demonstrate that our algorithms can prevent chosen-ciphertext attacks at a reasonable cost

Self-organising smart grid architectures for cyber-security

PhD ThesisCurrent conventional power systems consist of large-scale centralised generation and unidirectional power flow from generation to demand. This vision for power system design is being challenged by the need to satisfy the energy trilemma, as the system is required to be sustainable, available and secure. Emerging technologies are restructuring the power system; the addition of distributed generation, energy storage and active participation of customers are changing the roles and requirements of the distribution network. Increased controllability and monitoring requirements combined with an increase in controllable technologies has played a pivotal role in the transition towards smart grids. The smart grid concept features a large amount of sensing and monitoring equipment sharing large volumes of information. This increased reliance on the ICT infrastructure, raises the importance of cyber-security due to the number of vulnerabilities which can be exploited by an adversary. The aim of this research was to address the issue of cyber-security within a smart grid context through the application of self-organising communication architectures. The work examined the relevance and potential for self-organisation when performing voltage control in the presence of a denial of service attack event. The devised self-organising architecture used techniques adapted from a range of research domains including underwater sensor networks, wireless communications and smart-vehicle tracking applications. These components were redesigned for a smart grid application and supported by the development of a fuzzy based decision making engine. A multi-agent system was selected as the source platform for delivering the self-organising architecture The application of self-organisation for cyber-security within a smart grid context is a novel research area and one which presents a wide range of potential benefits for a future power system. The results indicated that the developed self-organising architecture was able to avoid control deterioration during an attack event involving up to 24% of the customer population. Furthermore, the system also reduces the communication load on the agents involved in the architecture and demonstrated wider reaching benefits beyond performing voltage control

Towards a Smarter Power Grid: Vulnerability Assessment and Security Metric Deployment

Smart Grid is considered as one of the most critical cyber-physical infrastructure; leveraging the advanced coupled communication infrastructure, it is designed to address the limitations and drawbacks of the current power grid and offer a more available, reliable, and efficient power delivery system. Despite its promised advantages, coupling a cyber system with the power grid would increase the grid attack surface by adding known cyber vulnerabilities and threats. Furthermore, security solutions proposed for the traditional power system may not be applicable for the smart grid since they do not consider all smart grid added characteristics (e.g., synchronization). Therefore, it is crucial to lay out a study for the smart grid vulnerabilities and propose corresponding security evaluation and mitigation techniques. In this thesis, our objective is to model the smart grid as a cyber-physical network considering all the characteristics of power and communication networks as well as the interdependencies among their component. We first propose a contingency analysis security evaluation framework for the smart grid considering concurrent failures resulting from malicious compromises. The proposed framework enables the utility to quantify and monitor the criticality level of the system under study from the security perspective, and decide on proper mitigation/protection actions to avoid catastrophic power outages. Then, we investigated the critical link (power or communication) identification problem in the smart grid. We highlight the importance of considering the interdependencies among the power and communication network components by showing how a single failure in one side of the grid (cyber or physical) could cascade through both sides and disrupt the power delivery service for a large area immediately. We study the minimum number of links whose removal would have the largest impact on the system in terms of unserved load. The result of this study is beneficial for efficient and optimal resource allocation while designing protection mechanisms for the grid. Finally, we address the power service restoration problem through network reconfiguration in the presence of distributed energy storage systems. Service restoration is a mandatory procedure which should be performed after any failure occurrence in order to increase the consumer satisfaction and decrease the penalty paid by utility. In this chapter, an optimal restoration approach is devised which is a combination of minimizing the restoration time, unserved load, and energy storage usage cost

Privacy Enforcement in a Cost-Effective Smart Grid

In this technical report we present the current state of the research conducted during the first part of the PhD period. The PhD thesis “Privacy Enforcement in a Cost-Effective Smart Grid” focuses on ensuring privacy when generating market for energy service providers that develop web services for the residential domain in the envisaged smart grid. The PhD project is funded and associated to the EU project “Energy Demand Aware Open Services for Smart Grid Intelligent Automation” (SmartHG) and therefore introduces the project on a system-level. Based on this, we present some of the integration, security and privacy challenges that emerge when designing a system architecture and infrastructure. The resulting architecture is a consumer-centric and agent-based design and uses open Internet-based communication protocols for enabling interoperability while being cost-effective. Finally, the PhD report presentthe envisaged future work and publications that will lead to completion of the PhD study

Enhanching Security in the Future Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber Physical System (CPS) is a system where cyber and physical components work in a complex co-ordination to provide better performance. By exploiting the communication infrastructure among the sensors, actuators, and control systems, attackers may compromise the security of a CPS. In this dissertation, security measures for different types of attacks/ faults in two CPSs, water supply system (WSS) and smart grid system, are presented. In this context, I also present my study on energy management in Smart Grid. The techniques for detecting attacks/faults in both WSS and Smart grid system adopt Kalman Filter (KF) and χ2 detector. The χ2 -detector can detect myriad of system fault- s/attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attack, short term and long term random attacks. However, the study shows that the χ2 -detector is unable to detect the intelligent False Data Injection attack (FDI). To overcome this limitation, I present a Euclidean detector for smart grid which can effectively detect such injection attacks. Along with detecting attack/faults I also present the isolation of the attacked/faulty nodes for smart grid. For isolation the Gen- eralized Observer Scheme (GOS) implementing Kalman Filter is used. As GOS is effective in isolating attacks/faults on a single sensor, it is unable to isolate simultaneous attacks/faults on multiple sensors. To address this issue, an Iterative Observer Scheme (IOS) is presented which is able to detect attack on multiple sensors. Since network is an integral part of the future CPSs, I also present a scheme for pre- serving privacy in the future Internet architecture, namely MobilityFirst architecture. The proposed scheme, called Anonymity in MobilityFirst (AMF), utilizes the three-tiered ap- proach to effectively exploit the inherent properties of MF Network such as Globally Unique Flat Identifier (GUID) and Global Name Resolution Service (GNRS) to provide anonymity to the users. While employing new proposed schemes in exchanging of keys between different tiers of routers to alleviate trust issues, the proposed scheme uses multiple routers in each tier to avoid collaboration amongst the routers in the three tiers to expose the end users

Security on smart grid: denial of service attack study on the PLC PRIME standard

The "smartization" of our world brings obvious benefits but it also conveys great risks and an intelligent network for electricity distribution, as Smart Grid poses, needs a solid security infrastructure. The Internet of Things has proven itself useful in many ways but at the same time questionable security-wise, and the PRIME implementation of a Smart Grid infrastructure is no exception. The intrusion and malicious control of an electrical system could mean from the consumption reports being eavesdropped to perhaps the electrical service for an entire building being cut off. Following the study of the PRIME standard I will prove the existence of exploitable vulnerabilities in its most widespread implementation. Focusing on a Denial of Service attack design, these weaknesses will be shown dangerous when the attack is detailed for a real-life scenario of the network. With all this, I hope to shed light on some of the most critical points concerning this implementation of a technology with still potential for improvement as the Smart Grid itself.La "smartización"de nuestro mundo trae consigo beneficios obvios pero a su vez conlleva grandes riesgos y una red inteligente para distribución eléctrica, tal y como trae la Smart Grid, necesita una sólida infraestructura de seguridad. El Internet de las Cosas ha demostrado ser útil pero al mismo tiempo cuestionable en lo respectivo a la seguridad, y la implementación PRIME de Smart Grid no es una excepción. Las intrusiones y el control malicioso de un sistema eléctrico podría suponer desde el espionaje de informes de consumo hasta el corte de suministro eléctrico de un edificio entero. Siguiendo el estudio del estándar PRIME demostraré la existencia de vulnerabilidades explotables en su versión más extendida. Centrándome en el diseño de un ataque de Denegación de Servicio, estas debilidades se tornarán peligrosas cuando el ataque quede detallado en un escenario realista de la red Con todo esto, espero arrojar luz sobre algunos de los puntos críticos relativos a esta implementación de una tecnología con margen de mejora como es Smart Grid.Ingeniería en Tecnologías de Telecomunicació

A Cyber-Physical System for integrated remote control andprotection of smart grid critical infrastructures

This work proposes a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) for protecting Smart Electric Grid Critical Infrastructures (CI) using video surveillance while remotely monitoring them. Due to the critical nature of Smart Grid, it is necessary to guarantee an adequate level of safety, security and reliability. Thus, this CPS is back-boned by a Time-Sensitive Network solution (TSN) providing concurrent support for smart-video surveillance and Smart Grid control over a single communication infrastructure. To this end, TSN delivers high-bandwidth communication for video surveil-lance and deterministic Quality of Service (QoS), latency and bandwidth guarantees, required by the time-critical Smart Grid control. On the one hand, the CPS utilizes High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) in the control subsystem via Remote Terminal Units (RTU) guaranteeing seamless failover against failures in Smart Grid. On the other hand, the smart video surveillance subsystem applies machine learning to monitor secured perimeters and detect people around the Smart Grid CI. Moreover, it is also able to directly interoperate with RTUs via MODBUS protocol to send alarms in case of e.g. intrusion. The work evaluates the accuracy and performance of the detection using common metrics in surveillance field. An integrated monitoring dashboard has also been developed in which all CPS information is available in real timeThis work was partially supported by the EU Project FitOptiVis [3] through the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under GA n. 783162, a Spanish National grant funded by MINECO through APCIN PCI2018-093184, and partially by the Research Network RED2018-102511-