Biblio
This paper presents a user-friendly design method for accurately sizing the distributed energy resources of a stand-alone microgrid to meet the critical load demands of a military, commercial, industrial, or residential facility when the utility power is not available. The microgrid combines renewable resources such as photovoltaics (PV) with an energy storage system to increase energy security for facilities with critical loads. The design tool's novelty includes compliance with IEEE standards 1562 and 1013 and addresses resilience, which is not taken into account in existing design methods. Several case studies, simulated with a physics-based model, validate the proposed design method. Additionally, the design and the simulations were validated by 24-hour laboratory experiments conducted on a microgrid assembled using commercial off the shelf components.
Nowadays, private corporations and public institutions are dealing with constant and sophisticated cyberthreats and cyberattacks. As a general warning, organizations must build and develop a cybersecurity culture and awareness in order to defend against cybercriminals. Information Technology (IT) and Information Security (InfoSec) audits that were efficient in the past, are trying to converge into cybersecurity audits to address cyber threats, cyber risks and cyberattacks that evolve in an aggressive cyber landscape. However, the increase in number and complexity of cyberattacks and the convoluted cyberthreat landscape is challenging the running cybersecurity audit models and putting in evidence the critical need for a new cybersecurity audit model. This article reviews the best practices and methodologies of global leaders in the cybersecurity assurance and audit arena. By means of the analysis of the current approaches and theoretical background, their real scope, strengths and weaknesses are highlighted looking forward a most efficient and cohesive synthesis. As a resut, this article presents an original and comprehensive cybersecurity audit model as a proposal to be utilized for conducting cybersecurity audits in organizations and Nation States. The CyberSecurity Audit Model (CSAM) evaluates and validates audit, preventive, forensic and detective controls for all organizational functional areas. CSAM has been tested, implemented and validated along with the Cybersecurity Awareness TRAining Model (CATRAM) in a Canadian higher education institution. A research case study is being conducted to validate both models and the findings will be published accordingly.
Industrial IoT (IIoT) is a specialized subset of IoT which involves the interconnection of industrial devices with ubiquitous control and intelligent processing services to improve industrial system's productivity and operational capability. In essence, IIoT adapts a use-case specific architecture based on RFID sense network, BLE sense network or WSN, where heterogeneous industrial IoT devices can collaborate with each other to achieve a common goal. Nonetheless, most of the IIoT deployments are brownfield in nature which involves both new and legacy technologies (SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System)). The merger of these technologies causes high degree of cross-linking and decentralization which ultimately increases the complexity of IIoT systems and introduce new vulnerabilities. Hence, industrial organizations becomes not only vulnerable to conventional SCADA attacks but also to a multitude of IIoT specific threats. However, there is a lack of understanding of these attacks both with respect to the literature and empirical evaluation. As a consequence, it is infeasible for industrial organizations, researchers and developers to analyze attacks and derive a robust security mechanism for IIoT. In this paper, we developed a multi-layer taxonomy of IIoT attacks by considering both brownfield and greenfield architecture of IIoT. The taxonomy consists of 11 layers 94 dimensions and approximately 100 attack techniques which helps to provide a holistic overview of the incident attack pattern, attack characteristics and impact on industrial system. Subsequently, we have exhibited the practical relevance of developed taxonomy by applying it to a real-world use-case. This research will benefit researchers and developers to best utilize developed taxonomy for analyzing attack sequence and to envisage an efficient security platform for futuristic IIoT applications.
As we notice the increasing adoption of Cellular IoT solutions (smart-home, e-health, among others), there are still some security aspects that can be improved as these devices can suffer various types of attacks that can have a high-impact over our daily lives. In order to avoid this, we present a multi-front security solution that consists on a federated cross-layered authentication mechanism, as well as a machine learning platform with anomaly detection techniques for data traffic analysis as a way to study devices' behavior so it can preemptively detect attacks and minimize their impact. In this paper, we also present a proof-of-concept to illustrate the proposed solution and showcase its feasibility, as well as the discussion of future iterations that will occur for this work.
Implementation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) can take place in many applications, for instance, automobiles, and industrial automation. We generally view the role of an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) or industrial network node that is occupied and interconnected in many different configurations in a vehicle or a factory. This condition may raise the occurrence of problems related to security issues, such as unauthorized access to data or components in ECUs or industrial network nodes. In this paper, we propose a hardware (HW)/software (SW) framework having integrated security extensions complemented with various security-related features that later can be implemented directly from the framework to All Programmable Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (AP MPSoC)-based ECUs. The framework is a software-defined one that can be configured or reconfigured in a higher level of abstraction language, including High-Level Synthesis (HLS), and the output of the framework is hardware configuration in multiprocessor or reconfigurable components in the FPGA. The system comprises high-level requirements, covert and side-channel estimation, cryptography, optimization, artificial intelligence, and partial reconfiguration. With this framework, we may reduce the design & development time, and provide significant flexibility to configure/reconfigure our framework and its target platform equipped with security extensions.
Today the integrity of digital documents and the authenticity of their origin is often hard to verify. Existing Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) are capable of certifying digital identities but do not provide solutions to immutably store signatures, and the process of certification is often not transparent. In this work we propose Veritaa, a Distributed Public Key Infrastructure and Signature Store (DPKISS). The major innovation of Veritaa is the Graph of Trust, a directed graph that uses relations between identity claims to certify the identities and stores signed relations to digital document identifiers. The distributed architecture of Veritaa and the Graph of Trust enables a transparent certification process. To ensure non-repudiation and immutability of all actions that have been signed on the Graph of Trust, an application specific Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is used as secure storage. In this work a reference implementation of the proposed architecture was designed and implemented. Furthermore, a testbed was created and used for the evaluation of Veritaa. The evaluation of Veritaa shows the benefits and the high performance of the proposed architecture.
Transactive Energy (TE) is an emerging discipline that utilizes economic and control techniques for operating and managing the power grid effectively. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) represent a fundamental shift away from traditionally centrally managed energy generation and storage to one that is rather distributed. However, integrating and managing DERs into the power grid is highly challenging owing to the TE implementation issues such as privacy, equity, efficiency, reliability, and security. The TE market structures allow utilities to transact (i.e., buy and sell) power services (production, distribution, and storage) from/to DER providers integrated as part of the grid. Flexible power pricing in TE enables power services transactions to dynamically adjust power generation and storage in a way that continuously balances power supply and demand as well as minimize cost of grid operations. Therefore, it has become important to analyze various market models utilized in different TE applications for their impact on above implementation issues.In this demo, we show-case the Transactive Energy Simulation and Analysis Toolsuite (TE-SAT) with its three publicly available design studios for experimenting with TE markets. All three design studios are built using metamodeling tool called the Web-based Graphical Modeling Environment (WebGME). Using a Git-like storage and tracking backend server, WebGME enables multi-user editing on models and experiments using simply a web-browser. This directly facilitates collaboration among different TE stakeholders for developing and analyzing grid operations and market models. Additionally, these design studios provide an integrated and scalable cloud backend for running corresponding simulation experiments.
Phishing sends malicious links or attachments through emails that can perform various functions, including capturing the victim's login credentials or account information. These emails harm the victims, cause money loss, and identity theft. In this paper, we contribute to solving the phishing problem by developing an extension for the Google Chrome web browser. In the development of this feature, we used JavaScript PL. To be able to identify and prevent the fishing attack, a combination of Blacklisting and semantic analysis methods was used. Furthermore, a database for phishing sites is generated, and the text, links, images, and other data on-site are analyzed for pattern recognition. Finally, our proposed solution was tested and compared to existing approaches. The results validate that our proposed method is capable of handling the phishing issue substantially.