Biblio

Conventional intrusion detection systems for smart grid communications rely heavily on static based attack detection techniques. In essence, signatures created from historical data are compared to incoming network traffic to identify abnormalities. In the case of attacks where no historical data exists, static based approaches become ineffective thus relinquishing system resilience and stability. Moving target defense (MTD) has shown to be effective in discouraging attackers by introducing system entropy to increase exploit costs. Increase in exploit cost leads to a decrease in profitability for an attacker. In this paper, a Moving Target Defense Intrusion Detection System (MTDIDS) is proposed for smart grid IPv6 based advanced metering infrastructure. The advantage of MTDIDS is the ability to detect anomalies across moving targets by means of planar keys thereupon increasing detection rate. Evaluation of MTDIDS was carried out in a smart grid advanced metering infrastructure simulated in MATLAB.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition(SCADA) communications are often subjected to various sophisticated cyber-attacks mostly because of their static system characteristics, enabling an attacker for easier profiling of the target system(s) and thereby impacting the Critical Infrastructures(CI). In this Paper, a novel approach to mitigate such static vulnerabilities is proposed by implementing a Moving Target Defense (MTD) strategy in a power grid SCADA environment, leveraging the existing communication network with an end-to-end IP-Hopping technique among trusted peers. The main contribution involves the design and implementation of MTD Architecture on Iowa State's PowerCyber testbed for targeted cyber-attacks, without compromising the availability of a SCADA system and studying the delay and throughput characteristics for different hopping rates in a realistic environment. Finally, we study two cases and provide mitigations for potential weaknesses of the proposed mechanism. Also, we propose to incorporate port mutation to further increase attack complexity as part of future work.

A smart grid (SG) consists of many subsystems and networks, all working together as a system of systems, many of which are vulnerable and can be attacked remotely. Therefore, security has been identified as one of the most challenging topics in SG development, and designing a mutual authentication scheme and a key management protocol is the first important step. This paper proposes an efficient scheme that mutually authenticates a smart meter of a home area network and an authentication server in SG by utilizing an initial password, by decreasing the number of steps in the secure remote password protocol from five to three and the number of exchanged packets from four to three. Furthermore, we propose an efficient key management protocol based on our enhanced identity-based cryptography for secure SG communications using the public key infrastructure. Our proposed mechanisms are capable of preventing various attacks while reducing the management overhead. The improved efficiency for key management is realized by periodically refreshing all public/private key pairs as well as any multicast keys in all the nodes using only one newly generated function broadcasted by the key generator entity. Security and performance analyses are presented to demonstrate these desirable attributes.