| Title | N-1 RTU Cyber-Physical Security Assessment Using State Estimation |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2019 |
| Authors | Xiong, Leilei, Grijalva, Santiago |
| Conference Name | 2019 IEEE Power Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM) |
| Date Published | aug |
| Keywords | control center, cyber-attack, cyber-attacks, cyber-physical impact, Cyber-physical security assessment, Cyber-physical systems, Damage Assessment, denial-of-service, electrical substations, EMS applications, energy management systems, IEEE 14-bus system, N-1 RTU cyber-physical security assessment, observability analysis, power system control, power system devices, power system security, power system state estimation, private networks, pubcrawl, Remote Terminal Units, Resiliency, SCADA system, SCADA systems, security of data, state estimation, state estimator, substation automation, supervisory control and data acquisition system, synthetic 200-bus system |
| Abstract | Real-time supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems use remote terminal units (RTUs) to monitor and manage the flow of power at electrical substations. As their connectivity to different utility and private networks increases, RTUs are becoming more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Some attacks seek to access RTUs to directly control power system devices with the intent to shed load or cause equipment damage. Other attacks (such as denial-of-service) target network availability and seek to block, delay, or corrupt communications between the RTU and the control center. In the most severe case, when communications are entirely blocked, the loss of an RTU can cause the power system to become unobservable. It is important to understand how losing an RTU impacts the system state (bus voltage magnitudes and angles). The system state is determined by the state estimator and serves as the input to other critical EMS applications. There is currently no systematic approach for assessing the cyber-physical impact of losing RTUs. This paper proposes a methodology for N-1 RTU cyber-physical security assessment that could benefit power system control and operation. We demonstrate our approach on the IEEE 14-bus system as well as on a synthetic 200-bus system. |
| DOI | 10.1109/PESGM40551.2019.8973873 |
| Citation Key | xiong_n-1_2019 |
N-1 RTU Cyber-Physical Security Assessment Using State Estimation