Bad Data Injection Attack and Defense in Electricity Market using Game Theory Study

Applications of cyber technologies improve the quality of monitoring and decision making in smart grid. These cyber technologies are vulnerable to malicious attacks, and compromising them can have serious technical and economical problems. This paper specifies the effect of compromising each measurement on the price of electricity, so that the attacker is able to change the prices in the desired direction (increasing or decreasing). Attacking and defending all measurements are impossible for the attacker and defender, respectively. This situation is modeled as a zero sum game between the attacker and defender. The game defines the proportion of times that the attacker and defender like to attack and defend different measurements, respectively. From the simulation results based on the PJM 5 Bus test system, we can show the effectiveness and properties of the studied game.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Special Issue on Cyber, Physical, and System Security for Smart Gri

3E: Energy-Efficient Elastic Scheduling for Independent Tasks in Heterogeneous Computing Systems

Reducing energy consumption is a major design constraint for modern heterogeneous computing systems to minimize electricity cost, improve system reliability and protect environment. Conventional energy-efficient scheduling strategies developed on these systems do not sufficiently exploit the system elasticity and adaptability for maximum energy savings, and do not simultaneously take account of user expected finish time. In this paper, we develop a novel scheduling strategy named energy-efficient elastic (3E) scheduling for aperiodic, independent and non-real-time tasks with user expected finish times on DVFS-enabled heterogeneous computing systems. The 3E strategy adjusts processors’ supply voltages and frequencies according to the system workload, and makes trade-offs between energy consumption and user expected finish times. Compared with other energy-efficient strategies, 3E significantly improves the scheduling quality and effectively enhances the system elasticity

Protection against overflow attacks

Buffer overflow happens when the runtime process loads more data into the buffer than its design capacity. Bad programming style and lack of security concern cause overflow vulnerabilities in almost all applications on all the platforms;Buffer overflow attack can target any data in stack or heap. The current solutions ignore the overflowed targets other than return address. Function pointer, for example, is a possible target of overflow attack. By overflowing the function pointer in stack or heap, the attacker could redirect the program control flow when the function pointer is dereferenced to make a function call. To address this problem we implemented protection against overflow attacks targeting function pointers. During compiling phase, our patch collects the set of the variables that might change the value of function pointers at runtime. During running phase, the set is protected by encryption before the value is saved in memory and decryption before the value is used. The function pointer protection will cover all the overflow attacks targeting function pointers;To further extend the protection to cover all possible overflowing targets, we implemented an anomaly detection which checks the program runtime behavior against control flow checking automata. The control flow checking automata are derived from the source codes of the application. A trust value is introduced to indicate how well the runtime program matches the automata. The attacks modifying the program behavior within the source codes could be detected;Both function pointer protection and control flow checking are compiler patches which require the access to source codes. To cover buffer overflow attack and enforce security policies regardless of source codes, we implemented a runtime monitor with stream automata. Stream automata extend the concept of security automata and edit automata. The monitor works on the interactions between two virtual entities: system and program. The security policies are expressed in stream automata which perform Truncation, Suppression, Insertion, Metamorphosis, Forcing, and Two-Way Forcing on the interactions. We implement a program/operating system monitor to detect overflow attack and a local network/Internet monitor to enforce honeywall policies