Biblio

One of the key objectives of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the smart grid advanced metering infrastructure is to threaten the availability of end user's metering data. This will surely disrupt the smooth operations of the grid and third party operators who need this data for billing and other grid control purposes. In previous work, we proposed a cloud-based Openflow firewall for mitigation against DDoS attack in a smart grid AMI. In this paper, PRISM model checker is used to perform a probabilistic best-and worst-case analysis of the firewall with regard to DDoS attack success under different firewall detection probabilities ranging from zero to 1. The results from this quantitative analysis can be useful in determining the extent the DDoS attack can undermine the correctness and performance of the firewall. In addition, the study can also be helpful in knowing the extent the firewall can be improved by applying the knowledge derived from the worst-case performance of the firewall.

Recent architectures for the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) have incorporated several back-end systems that handle billing and other smart grid control operations. The non-availability of metering data when needed or the untimely delivery of data needed for control operations will undermine the activities of these back-end systems. Unfortunately, there are concerns that cyber attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) will manifest in magnitude and complexity in a smart grid AMI network. Such attacks will range from a delay in the availability of end user's metering data to complete denial in the case of a grounded network. This paper proposes a cloud-based (IaaS) firewall for the mitigation of DDoS attacks in a smart grid AMI network. The proposed firewall has the ability of not only mitigating the effects of DDoS attack but can prevent the attack before they are launched. Our proposed firewall system leverages on cloud computing technology which has an added advantage of reducing the burden of data computations and storage for smart grid AMI back-end systems. The openflow firewall proposed in this study is a better security solution with regards to the traditional on-premises DoS solutions which cannot cope with the wide range of new attacks targeting the smart grid AMI network infrastructure. Simulation results generated from the study show that our model can guarantee the availability of metering/control data and could be used to improve the QoS of the smart grid AMI network under a DDoS attack scenario.