Biblio

Transactive energy systems (TES) are emerging as a transformative solution for the problems that distribution system operators face due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and rapid growth in scalability of managing active distribution system (ADS). On the one hand, these changes pose a decentralized power system control problem, requiring strategic control to maintain reliability and resiliency for the community and for the utility. On the other hand, they require robust financial markets while allowing participation from diverse prosumers. To support the computing and flexibility requirements of TES while preserving privacy and security, distributed software platforms are required. In this paper, we enable the study and analysis of security concerns by developing Transactive Energy Security Simulation Testbed (TESST), a TES testbed for simulating various cyber attacks. In this work, the testbed is used for TES simulation with centralized clearing market, highlighting weaknesses in a centralized system. Additionally, we present a blockchain enabled decentralized market solution supported by distributed computing for TES, which on one hand can alleviate some of the problems that we identify, but on the other hand, may introduce newer issues. Future study of these differing paradigms is necessary and will continue as we develop our security simulation testbed.

As the Industrial Internet of Things (IIot) becomes more prevalent in critical application domains, ensuring security and resilience in the face of cyber-attacks is becoming an issue of paramount importance. Cyber-attacks against critical infrastructures, for example, against smart water-distribution and transportation systems, pose serious threats to public health and safety. Owing to the severity of these threats, a variety of security techniques are available. However, no single technique can address the whole spectrum of cyber-attacks that may be launched by a determined and resourceful attacker. In light of this, we consider a multi-pronged approach for designing secure and resilient IIoT systems, which integrates redundancy, diversity, and hardening techniques. We introduce a framework for quantifying cyber-security risks and optimizing IIoT design by determining security investments in redundancy, diversity, and hardening. To demonstrate the applicability of our framework, we present a case study in water-distribution systems. Our numerical evaluation shows that integrating redundancy, diversity, and hardening can lead to reduced security risk at the same cost.

Network connectivity is a primary attribute and a characteristic phenomenon of any networked system. A high connectivity is often desired within networks; for instance to increase robustness to failures, and resilience against attacks. A typical approach to increasing network connectivity is to strategically add links; however adding links is not always the most suitable option. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to improving network connectivity, that is by making a small subset of nodes and edges “trusted,” which means that such nodes and edges remain intact at all times and are insusceptible to failures. We then show that by controlling the number of trusted nodes and edges, any desired level of network connectivity can be obtained. Along with characterizing network connectivity with trusted nodes and edges, we present heuristics to compute a small number of such nodes and edges. Finally, we illustrate our results on various networks.

In the Internet-of-Things (IoT), users might share part of their data with different IoT prosumers, which offer applications or services. Within this open environment, the existence of an adversary introduces security risks. These can be related, for instance, to the theft of user data, and they vary depending on the security controls that each IoT prosumer has put in place. To minimize such risks, users might seek an “optimal” set of prosumers. However, assuming the adversary has the same information as the users about the existing security measures, he can then devise which prosumers will be preferable (e.g., with the highest security levels) and attack them more intensively. This paper proposes a decision-support approach that minimizes security risks in the above scenario. We propose a non-cooperative, two-player game entitled Prosumers Selection Game (PSG). The Nash Equilibria of PSG determine subsets of prosumers that optimize users' payoffs. We refer to any game solution as the Nash Prosumers Selection (NPS), which is a vector of probabilities over subsets of prosumers. We show that when using NPS, a user faces the least expected damages. Additionally, we show that according to NPS every prosumer, even the least secure one, is selected with some non-zero probability. We have also performed simulations to compare NPS against two different heuristic selection algorithms. The former is proven to be approximately 38% more effective in terms of security-risk mitigation.