Evaluation of Time-Critical Communications for IEC 61850-Substation Network Architecture

Present-day developments, in electrical power transmission and distribution, require considerations of the status quo. In other meaning, international regulations enforce increasing of reliability and reducing of environment impact, correspondingly they motivate developing of dependable systems. Power grids especially intelligent (smart grids) ones become industrial solutions that follow standardized development. The International standardization, in the field of power transmission and distribution, improve technology influences. The rise of dedicated standards for SAS (Substation Automation Systems) communications, such as the leading International Electro-technical Commission standard IEC 61850, enforces modern technological trends in this field. Within this standard, a constraint of low ETE (End-to-End) latency should be respected, and time-critical status transmission must be achieved. This experimental study emphasis on IEC 61850 SAS communication standard, e.g. IEC 61850 GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Events), to implement an investigational method to determine the protection communication delay. This method observes GOOSE behaviour by adopting monitoring and analysis capabilities. It is observed by using network test equipment, i.e. SPAN (Switch Port Analyser) and TAP (Test Access Point) devices, with on-the-shelf available hardware and software solutions

Formation cybersécurité des systèmes industriels pour les ingénieurs non-informaticiens

National audienceNous présentons une nouvelle formation d'initiation des ingénieurs non-informaticiens à la cybersécurité des systèmes industriels. Le module est basé sur le MOOC « Cybersécurité » de l'ANSSI, les supports CyberEdu et un cycle de mini-projets de découverte pratique des concepts de la cybersécurité (interception du trafic, injection de données, détection des intrusions, filtrage du trafic). Les scénarios des mini-projets peuvent être exécutés à distance sur une plateforme matérielle

Experimental Evaluation of an IEC 61850-Station Bus Communication Reliability

National audienceRecent improvements, in electrical power transmission and distribution, require considerations of existing regulations that enforce increasing of reliability and reducing of environment impact. Smart grids become industrial solutions that follow standardized development. These technologies are affected by international standardization in the field of power transmission and distribution. This study emphasis on modern SAS (Substation Automation System) communication standards, e.g. IEC 61850 GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Events), to present an experimental method to calculate End-To-End delay by utilizing monitoring capabilities and using network equipment such as SPAN and TAP devices

Dependability Optimization of Process-level Protection in an IEC-61850-Based Substation

International audiencePower substations are intensively renovated toward using information and communication technologies such as object oriented modeling and Ethernet networks. In the last two decades, Substation automation systems used capabilities of network communication services adopted from sophisticated international standardization such as IEC 61850. Distributed safety related functions take advantage of these technologies to protect the process-level equipment. Substation devices such as intelligent electronic devices, measurement units and circuit breaker controllers, with new capabilities, i.e. enabling IEC 61850, are integrated to build the protection and control functions that form the safety-related system. The objective of this research is to evaluate quantitatively the dependability for transformer protection architectures in the bay level.Safety integrity levels model, described in both IEC 62061 and IEC 61508, gives measurements for safety integrity levels according to the probability of failure. The determination of these levels is an approach to estimate system dependability

Power Utility Automation Cybersecurity: IEC 61850 Specification of an Intrusion Detection Function

International audienceThe IEC 61850 standard defines a global framework for designing power utility automation systems. The main goal of IEC 61850 being interoperability, it brings information and tools for both system modelling and communication architecture. But cybersecurity measures and propositions are scarce. They should be a priority. To help fill this lack of cybersecurity, we specify a fully IEC 61850-compatible intrusion detection function. This paper explains the procedure of defining functions and necessary model objects consistent with the standard requirements. We then detail our intrusion detection function

A Test bed dedicated to the Study of Vulnerabilities in IEC 61850 Power Utility Automation Networks

International audienceIndustrial control systems rely more and more on digital technologies. Although the cyber risk such technologies induce is widely judged as serious, especially for critical infrastructures, these systems have generally not been designed to serve cybersecurity purposes. Instead they were thought first for serving operational efficiency. It thus becomes critical to study cyber threats in industrial environments and experimental test beds are needed to evaluate risks, physical consequences of cyber incidents, and performance of countermeasures. The test bed we present here focuses on studying cyber risks and their mitigation in IEC 61850 power utility automation systems. The operational part is composed of engineering computers, supervision software, off-the-shelf intelligent relays (Intelligent Electronic Device – IED), a hardware-in-the-loop process simulation, and the cybersecurity tools include an attack generation station and a network analyzer. In this paper, we present the operational part, giving details on the power grid hardware-in-the-loop simulation and its importance in the understanding of cyber consequences on the global system. The article concludes giving preliminary experimental results showing consequences of a false data injection attack on a simple electrical architecture

Real-Time Performance and Security of IEC 61850 Process Bus Communications

International audienceModern power-network communications are based on the IEC 61850 series standards. In this paper, we investigate the real-time performance and the vulnerabilities and attack scenarios at the sensor level communication networks more precisely on Sampled Measured Value protocol. The approach jointly evaluates the communication protocol, network topology and impact on electrical protection functions. We test the practical feasibility of the attacks on an experimental workbench using real devices in a hardware-in-the-loop setup. The tests are conducted on the two high-availability automation networks currently used in IEC 61850 process bus communications: Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) and High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR)

Experimental study of performance and vulnerabilities of IEC 61850 process bus communications on HSR networks

International audienceModern power-network communications are based on the IEC 61850 series standards. In this paper we investigate the real-time performance, the vulnerabilities and the attack scenarios on the sensor level communication networks, more precisely on the Sampled Measured Value (SMV) protocol. There are two main contributions of our work. First, we evaluate statistically the measured real-time performance of the communication network. The second contribution is the description, implementation and experimental validation of the attacks on SMV protocol targeting electrical protection functions

Some Considerations on Dependability Issues and Cyber-Security of Cyber-Physical Systems

International audienceFor the last recent years, there has been a convergence between computer engineering approaches and automation aspects (industrial systems, internet of things) also called cyber-physical systems, for the development of process-based cyber-security strategies. Classically, security studies are based on risk analysis. Compared to classical IT approaches, the actual process (for instance a nuclear power plant or a chemical process) or system (autonomous car, drone) are taken into account in our approach for two reasons. The first reason is that the vulnerabilities of such systems or processes vary dynamically as a function of the time, the second reason is because the "standards" context is depending on the application domain and relationships with the IEC 61508 functional safety standard seems relevant. The paper presents a state of the art of problematics and proposed some approaches to these issues