Biblio

Many critical industrial control systems integrate a mixture of state-of-the-art and legacy equipment. Legacy installations lack advanced, and often even basic security features, risking entire system security. Existing research primarily focuses on the development of secure protocols for emerging devices or protocol translation proxies for legacy equipment. However, a robust security framework not only needs encryption but also mechanisms to prevent reconnaissance and unauthorized access to industrial devices. This paper proposes a novel Edge Security Gateway (ESG) that provides both, communication and endpoint security. The ESG is based on double ratchet algorithm and encrypts every message with a different key. It manages the ongoing renewal of short-lived session keys and provides localized firewall protection to individual devices. The ESG is easily customizable for a wide range of industrial application. As a use case, this paper presents the design and validation for synchrophasor technology in smart grid. The ESG effectiveness is practically validated in detecting reconnaissance, manipulation, replay, and command injection attacks due to its perfect forward and backward secrecy properties.

Synchrophasor technology is used for real-time control and monitoring in smart grid. Previous works in literature identified critical vulnerabilities in IEEE C37.118.2 synchrophasor communication standard. To protect synchrophasor-based systems, stealthy cyber-attacks and effective defense mechanisms still need to be investigated.This paper investigates how an attacker can develop a custom tool to execute stealthy man-in-the-middle attacks against synchrophasor devices. In particular, four different types of attack capabilities have been demonstrated in a real synchrophasor-based synchronous islanding testbed in laboratory: (i) command injection attack, (ii) packet drop attack, (iii) replay attack and (iv) stealthy data manipulation attack. With deep technical understanding of the attack capabilities and potential physical impacts, this paper also develops and tests a distributed Intrusion Detection System (IDS) following NIST recommendations. The functionalities of the proposed IDS have been validated in the testbed for detecting aforementioned cyber-attacks. The paper identified that a distributed IDS with decentralized decision making capability and the ability to learn system behavior could effectively detect stealthy malicious activities and improve synchrophasor network security.