Smart Grid Systems Based Survey on Cyber Security Issues

The future power system will be an innovative administration of existing power grids, which is called smart grid. Above all, the application of advanced communication and computing tools is going to significantly improve the productivity and consistency of smart grid systems with renewable energy resources. Together with the topographies of the smart grid, cyber security appears as a serious concern since a huge number of automatic devices are linked through communication networks. Cyber attacks on those devices had a direct influence on the reliability of extensive infrastructure of the power system.  In this survey, several published works related to smart grid system vulnerabilities, potential intentional attacks, and suggested countermeasures for these threats have been investigated

On the Role of Primary and Secondary Assets in Adaptive Security: An Application in Smart Grids

peer-reviewedAdaptive security aims to protect valuable assets managed by a system, by applying a varying set of security controls. Engineering adaptive security is not an easy task. A set of effective security countermeasures should be identified. These countermeasures should not only be applied to (primary) assets that customers desire to protect, but also to other (secondary) assets that can be exploited by attackers to harm the primary assets. Another challenge arises when assets vary dynamically at runtime. To accommodate these variabilities, it is necessary to monitor changes in assets, and apply the most appropriate countermeasures at runtime. The paper provides three main contributions for engineering adaptive security. First, it proposes a modeling notation to represent primary and secondary assets, along with their variability. Second, it describes how to use the extended models in engineering security requirements and designing required monitoring functions. Third, the paper illustrates our approach through a set of adaptive security scenarios in the customer domain of a smart grid. We suggest that modeling secondary assets aids the deployment of countermeasures, and, in combination with a representation of assets variability, facilitates the design of monitoring function

On Cyber-Physical Security of Smart Grid: Data Integrity Attacks and Experiment Platform

A Smart Grid is a digitally enabled electric power grid that integrates the computation and communication technologies from cyber world with the sensors and actuators from physical world. Due to the system complexity, typically the high cohesion of communication and power system, the Smart Grid innovation introduces new and fundamentally different security vulnerabilities and risks. In this work, two important research aspects about cyber-physical security of Smart Grid are addressed: (i) The construction, impact and countermeasure of data integrity attacks; and (ii) The design and implementation of general cyber-physical security experiment platform. For data integrity attacks: based on the system model of state estimation process in Smart Grid, firstly, a data integrity attack model is formulated, such that the attackers can generate financial benefits from the real-time electrical market operations. Then, to reduce the required knowledge about the targeted power system when launching attacks, an online attack approach is proposed, such that the attacker is able to construct the desired attacks without the network information of power system. Furthermore, a network information attacking strategy is proposed, in which the most vulnerable meters can be directly identified and the desired measurement perturbations can be achieved by strategically manipulating the network information. Besides the attacking strategies, corresponding countermeasures based on the sparsity of attack vectors and robust state estimator are provided respectively. For the experiment platform: ScorePlus, a software-hardware hybrid and federated experiment environment for Smart Grid is presented. ScorePlus incorporates both software emulator and hardware testbed, such that they all follow the same architecture, and the same Smart Grid application program can be tested on either of them without any modification; ScorePlus provides a federated environment such that multiple software emulators and hardware testbeds at different locations are able to connect and form a unified Smart Grid system; ScorePlus software is encapsulated as a resource plugin in OpenStack cloud computing platform, such that it supports massive deployments with large scale test cases in cloud infrastructure

Security Evaluation of Cyber-Physical Systems in Society- Critical Internet of Things

In this paper, we present evaluation of security awareness of developers and users of cyber-physical systems. Our study includes interviews, workshops, surveys and one practical evaluation. We conducted 15 interviews and conducted survey with 55 respondents coming primarily from industry. Furthermore, we performed practical evaluation of current state of practice for a society-critical application, a commercial vehicle, and reconfirmed our findings discussing an attack vector for an off-line societycritical facility. More work is necessary to increase usage of security strategies, available methods, processes and standards. The security information, currently often insufficient, should be provided in the user manuals of products and services to protect system users. We confirmed it lately when we conducted an additional survey of users, with users feeling as left out in their quest for own security and privacy. Finally, hardware-related security questions begin to come up on the agenda, with a general increase of interest and awareness of hardware contribution to the overall cyber-physical security. At the end of this paper we discuss possible countermeasures for dealing with threats in infrastructures, highlighting the role of authorities in this quest

On the Impact of Wireless Jamming on the Distributed Secondary Microgrid Control

The secondary control in direct current microgrids (MGs) is used to restore the voltage deviations caused by the primary droop control, where the latter is implemented locally in each distributed generator and reacts to load variations. Numerous recent works propose to implement the secondary control in a distributed fashion, relying on a communication system to achieve consensus among MG units. This paper shows that, if the system is not designed to cope with adversary communication impairments, then a malicious attacker can apply a simple jamming of a few units of the MG and thus compromise the secondary MG control. Compared to other denial-of-service attacks that are oriented against the tertiary control, such as economic dispatch, the attack on the secondary control presented here can be more severe, as it disrupts the basic functionality of the MG

On specification-based cyber-attack detection in smart grids

The transformation of power grids into intelligent cyber-physical systems brings numerous benefits, but also significantly increases the surface for cyber-attacks, demanding appropriate countermeasures. However, the development, validation, and testing of data-driven countermeasures against cyber-attacks, such as machine learning-based detection approaches, lack important data from real-world cyber incidents. Unlike attack data from real-world cyber incidents, infrastructure knowledge and standards are accessible through expert and domain knowledge. Our proposed approach uses domain knowledge to define the behavior of a smart grid under non-attack conditions and detect attack patterns and anomalies. Using a graph-based specification formalism, we combine cross-domain knowledge that enables the generation of whitelisting rules not only for statically defined protocol fields but also for communication flows and technical operation boundaries. Finally, we evaluate our specification-based intrusion detection system against various attack scenarios and assess detection quality and performance. In particular, we investigate a data manipulation attack in a future-orientated use case of an IEC 60870-based SCADA system that controls distributed energy resources in the distribution grid. Our approach can detect severe data manipulation attacks with high accuracy in a timely and reliable manner