Biblio

Cyber physical system (CPS) Critical infrastructures (CIs) like the power and energy systems are increasingly becoming vulnerable to cyber attacks. Mitigating cyber risks in CIs is one of the key objectives of the design and maintenance of these systems. These CPS CIs commonly use legacy devices for remote monitoring and control where complete upgrades are uneconomical and infeasible. Therefore, risk assessment plays an important role in systematically enumerating and selectively securing vulnerable or high-risk assets through optimal investments in the cybersecurity of the CPS CIs. In this paper, we propose a CPS CI security framework and software tool, CySec Game, to be used by the CI industry and academic researchers to assess cyber risks and to optimally allocate cybersecurity investments to mitigate the risks. This framework uses attack tree, attack-defense tree, and game theory algorithms to identify high-risk targets and suggest optimal investments to mitigate the identified risks. We evaluate the efficacy of the framework using the tool by implementing a smart grid case study that shows accurate analysis and feasible implementation of the framework and the tool in this CPS CI environment.

The accelerated move toward adopting the Smart Grid paradigm has resulted in numerous drawbacks as far as security is concerned. Traditional power grids are becoming more vulnerable to cyberattacks as all the control decisions are generated based on the data the Smart Grid generates during its operation. This data can be tampered with or attacked in communication lines to mislead the control room in decision-making. The false data injection attack (FDIA) is one of the most severe cyberattacks on today’s cyber-physical power system, as it has the potential to cause significant physical and financial damage. However, detecting cyberattacks are incredibly challenging since they have no known patterns. In this paper, we launch a random FDIA on IEEE-39 bus system. Later, we propose a Bagging MLP-based autoencoder to detect the FDIAs in the power system and compare the result with a single ML model. The Bagging MLP-based autoencoder outperforms the Isolation forest while detecting FDIAs.

Power system state estimation is an essential tool for monitoring the operating conditions of the grid. However, the collected measurements may not always be reliable due to bad data from various faults as well as the increasing potential of being exposed to cyber-attacks, particularly from data injection attacks. To enhance the accuracy of state estimation, this paper presents a back-propagation neural network to detect and identify bad data and false data injections. A variety of training data exhibiting different statistical properties were used for training. The developed strategy was tested on the IEEE 30-bus and 118-bus power systems using MATLAB. Simulation results revealed the feasibility of the method for the detection and differentiation of bad data and false data injections in various operating scenarios.

Multi-active bridge (MAB) converter has played an important role in the power conversion of renewable-based smart grids, electrical vehicles, and more/all electrical aircraft. However, the increase of MAB submodules greatly complicates the control architecture. In this regard, the conventional centralized control strategies, which rely on a single controller to process all the information, will be limited by the computation burden. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a decentralized power management strategy for MAB converter. The switching frequencies of MAB submodules are adaptively regulated based on the submodule local information. Through this effort, flexible electrical power routing can be realized without communications among submodules. The proposed methodology not only relieves the computation burden of MAB control system, but also improves its modularity, flexibility, and expandability. Finally, the experiment results of a three-module MAB converter are presented for verification.

Various approaches of microgrid operation have been proposed, albeit with noticeable issues such as power-sharing, control of frequency and voltage excursions, applicability on different grids, etc. This paper proposes a goal function-based, decentralized control that addresses the mentioned problems and secures the microgrid stability by constraining the frequency and node deviations across the grid while simultaneously supporting the desired active power exchange between prosumer nodes. The control algorithm is independent of network topology and enables arbitrary node connection, i.e. seamless microgrid expandability. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, simulation results are presented and discussed.

This contribution provides the implementation of a digital twin-based assistance system to be used in future control rooms. By applying parameter estimation methods, the dynamic model in the digital twin is an accurate representation of the physical system. Therefore, a dynamic security assessment (DSA) that is highly dependent on a correctly parameterized dynamic model, can give more reliable information to a system operator in the control room. The assistance system is studied on the Cigré TB 536 benchmark system with an obscured set of machine parameters. Through the proposed parameter estimation approach the original parameters could be estimated, changing, and increasing the statement of the DSA in regard to imminent instabilities.

Cloud provides access to shared pool of resources like storage, networking, and processing. Distributed denial of service attacks are dangerous for Cloud services because they mainly target the availability of resources. It is important to detect and prevent a DDoS attack for the continuity of Cloud services. In this review, we analyze the different mechanisms of detection and prevention of the DDoS attacks in Clouds. We identify the major DDoS attacks in Clouds and compare the frequently-used strategies to detect, prevent, and mitigate those attacks that will help the future researchers in this area.

Guidelines, directives, and policy statements are usually presented in “linear” text form - word after word, page after page. However necessary, this practice impedes full understanding, obscures feedback dynamics, hides mutual dependencies and cascading effects and the like-even when augmented with tables and diagrams. The net result is often a checklist response as an end in itself. All this creates barriers to intended realization of guidelines and undermines potential effectiveness. We present a solution strategy using text as “data”, transforming text into a structured model, and generate network views of the text(s), that we then can use for vulnerability mapping, risk assessments and note control point analysis. For proof of concept we draw on NIST conceptual model and analysis of guidelines for smart grid cybersecurity, more than 600 pages of text.

In the Smart Grid paradigm, this critical infrastructure operation is increasingly exposed to cyber-threats due to the increased dependency on communication networks. An adversary can launch an attack on a power grid operation through False Data Injection into system measurements and/or through attacks on the communication network, such as flooding the communication channels with unnecessary data or intercepting messages. A cross-layered strategy that combines power grid data, communication grid monitoring and Machine Learning-based processing is a promising solution for detecting cyber-threats. In this paper, an implementation of an integrated solution of a cross-layer framework is presented. The advantage of such a framework is the augmentation of valuable data that enhances the detection of anomalies in the operation of power grid. IEEE 118-bus system is built in Simulink to provide a power grid testing environment and communication network data is emulated using SimComponents. The performance of the framework is investigated under various FDI and communication attacks.

With the intelligent development of power system, due to the double-layer structure of smart grid and the characteristics of failure propagation across layers, the attack path also changes significantly: from single-layer to multi-layer and from static to dynamic. In response to the shortcomings of the single-layer attack path of traditional attack path identification methods, this paper proposes the idea of cross-layer attack, which integrates the threat propagation mechanism of the information layer and the failure propagation mechanism of the physical layer to establish a forward-backward bi-directional detection model. The model is mainly used to predict possible cross-layer attack paths and evaluate their path generation probabilities to provide theoretical guidance and technical support for defenders. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper can well identify the dynamic cross-layer attacks in the smart grid.

The demand for increasing flexibility use in power systems is stressed by the changing grid utilization. Making use of largely untapped flexibility potential is possible through novel flexibility markets. Different approaches for these markets are being developed and vary considering their handling of transaction schemes and relation of participating entities. This paper delivers the conceptual development of a holistic system architecture for the realization of an interregional flexibility market, which targets a market based congestion management in the transmission and distribution system through trading between system operators and flexibility providers. The framework combines a market mechanism with the required supplements like appropriate control algorithms for emergency situations, cyber-physical system monitoring and cyber-security assessment. The resulting methods are being implemented and verified in a remote-power-hardware-in-the-loop setup coupling a real world low voltage grid with a geographically distant real time simulation using state of the art control system applications with an integration of the aforementioned architecture components.

False data injection cyber-attack detection models on smart grid operation have been much explored recently, considering analytical physics-based and data-driven solutions. Recently, a hybrid data-driven physics-based model framework for monitoring the smart grid is developed. However, the framework has not been implemented in real-time environment yet. In this paper, the framework of the hybrid model is developed within a real-time simulation environment. OPAL-RT real-time simulator is used to enable Hardware-in-the-Loop testing of the framework. IEEE 9-bus system is considered as a testing grid for gaining insight. The process of building the framework and the challenges faced during development are presented. The performance of the framework is investigated under various false data injection attacks.

The emergence of smart cars has revolutionized the automotive industry. Today's vehicles are equipped with different types of electronic control units (ECUs) that enable autonomous functionalities like self-driving, self-parking, lane keeping, and collision avoidance. The ECUs are connected to each other through an in-vehicle network, named Controller Area Network. In this talk, we will present the different cyber attacks that target autonomous vehicles and explain how an intrusion detection system (IDS) using machine learning can play a role in securing the Controller Area Network. We will also discuss the main research contributions for the security of autonomous vehicles. Specifically, we will describe our IDS, named Histogram-based Intrusion Detection and Filtering framework. Next, we will talk about the machine learning explainability issue that limits the acceptability of machine learning in autonomous vehicles, and how it can be addressed using our novel intrusion detection system based on rule extraction methods from Deep Neural Networks.

Electrical substations in power grid act as the critical interface points for the transmission and distribution networks. Over the years, digital technology has been integrated into the substations for remote control and automation. As a result, substations are more prone to cyber attacks and exposed to digital vulnerabilities. One of the notable cyber attack vectors is the malicious command injection, which can lead to shutting down of substations and subsequently power outages as demonstrated in Ukraine Power Plant Attack in 2015. Prevailing measures based on cyber rules (e.g., firewalls and intrusion detection systems) are often inadequate to detect advanced and stealthy attacks that use legitimate-looking measurements or control messages to cause physical damage. Additionally, defenses that use physics-based approaches (e.g., power flow simulation, state estimation, etc.) to detect malicious commands suffer from high latency. Machine learning serves as a potential solution in detecting command injection attacks with high accuracy and low latency. However, sufficient datasets are not readily available to train and evaluate the machine learning models. In this paper, focusing on this particular challenge, we discuss various approaches for the generation of synthetic data that can be used to train the machine learning models. Further, we evaluate the models trained with the synthetic data against attack datasets that simulates malicious commands injections with different levels of sophistication. Our findings show that synthetic data generated with some level of power grid domain knowledge helps train robust machine learning models against different types of attacks.

Smart grid is a new generation of grid that inte-grates traditional grid and grid information system, and infor-mation security of smart grid is an extremely important part of the whole grid. The research of trusted computing technology provides new ideas to protect the information security of the power grid. To address the problem of large deviations in the calculation of credible dynamic thresholds due to the existence of characteristics such as self-similarity and traffic bursts in smart grid information collection, a traffic prediction model based on ARMA and Poisson process is proposed. And the Hurst coefficient is determined more accurately using R/S analysis, which finally improves the efficiency and accuracy of the trusted dynamic threshold calculation.

5G network slicing plays a key role in the smart grid business. The existing authentication schemes for 5G slicing in smart grids require high computing costs, so they are time-consuming and do not fully consider the security of authentication. Aiming at the application scenario of 5G smart grid, this paper proposes an identity-based lightweight secondary authentication scheme. Compared with other well-known methods, in the protocol interaction of this paper, both the user Ui and the grid server can authenticate each other's identities, thereby preventing illegal users from pretending to be identities. The grid user Ui and the grid server can complete the authentication process without resorting to complex bilinear mapping calculations, so the computational overhead is small. The grid user and grid server can complete the authentication process without transmitting the original identification. Therefore, this scheme has the feature of anonymous authentication. In this solution, the authentication process does not require infrastructure such as PKI, so the deployment is simple. Experimental results show that the protocol is feasible in practical applications

In this paper we consider cyber security requirements of the smart buildings. We identify cyber risks, threats, attack scenarios, security objectives and related security controls. The work was done as a part of a smart building design and construction work. From the controls identified w e concluded security practices for engineering-in smart buildings security. The paper provides an idea toward which system security engineers can strive in the basic design and implementation of the most critical components of the smart buildings. The intent of the concept is to help practitioners to avoid ad hoc approaches in the development of security mechanisms for smart buildings with shared space.

The increasing demand for the interconnected IoT based smart grid is facing threats from cyber-attacks due to inherent vulnerability in the smart grid network. There is a pressing need to evaluate and model these vulnerabilities in the network to avoid cascading failures in power systems. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a vulnerability assessment framework based on attack probability for the protection and security of a smart grid. Several factors were taken into consideration such as the probability of attack, propagation of attack from a parent node to child nodes, effectiveness of basic metering system, Kalman estimation and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). The IEEE-300 bus smart grid was simulated using MATPOWER to study the effectiveness of the proposed framework by injecting false data injection attacks (FDIA); and studying their propagation. Our results show that the use of severity assessment standards such as Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), AMI measurements and Kalman estimates were very effective for evaluating the vulnerability assessment of smart grid in the presence of FDIA attack scenarios.

Smart grid (SG) is considered the next generation of the traditional power grid. It is mainly divided into three main infrastructures: power system, information and communication infrastructures. Cybersecurity is imperative for information infrastructure and the secure, reliable, and efficient operation of the smart grid. Cybersecurity or a lack of proper implementation thereof poses a considerable challenge to the deployment of SG. Therefore, in this paper, A comprehensive survey of cyber security is presented in the smart grid context. Cybersecurity-related information infrastructure is clarified. The impact of adopting cybersecurity on control and management systems has been discussed. Also, the paper highlights the cybersecurity issues and challenges associated with the control decisions in the smart grid.

With the gradual construction and implementation of cloud computing, the information security problem of the smart grid has surfaced. Therefore, in the construction of the smart grid cloud computing platform, information security needs to be considered in planning, infrastructure, and management at the same time, and it is imminent to build an information network that is secure from terminal to the platform to data. This paper introduces the concept of cloud security technology and the latest development of cloud security technology and discusses the main strategies of cloud security construction in electric power enterprises.

In order to solve the problem of untargeted data security grading methods in the process of power grid data governance, this paper analyzes the mainstream data security grading standards at home and abroad, investigates and sorts out the characteristics of power grid data security grading requirements, and proposes a method that considers national, social, and A grid data security classification scheme for the security impact of four dimensions of individuals and enterprises. The plan determines the principle of power grid data security classification. Based on the basic idea of “who will be affected to what extent and to what extent when the power grid data security is damaged”, it defines three classification factors that need to be considered: the degree of impact, the scope of influence, and the objects of influence, and the power grid data is divided into five security levels. In the operation stage of power grid data security grading, this paper sorts out the experience and gives the recommended grading process. This scheme basically conforms to the status quo of power grid data classification, and lays the foundation for power grid data governance.

In today's era, the smart grid is the carrier of the new energy technology revolution and a very critical development stage for grid intelligence. In the process of smart grid operation, maintenance and maintenance, many heterogeneous and polymorphic data can be formed, that is to say big data. This paper analyzes the power big data prediction technology for smart grid applications, and proposes practical application strategies In this paper, an in-depth analysis of the relationship between cloud computing and big data key technologies and smart grid is carried out, and an overview of the key technologies of electric power big data is carried out.

5G has significantly facilitated the development of attractive applications such as autonomous driving and telemedicine due to its lower latency, higher data rates, and enormous connectivity. However, there are still some security and privacy issues in 5G, such as network slicing privacy and flexibility and efficiency of network slicing selection. In the smart grid scenario, this paper proposes a 5G slice selection security scheme based on the Pohlig-Hellman algorithm, which realizes the protection of slice selection privacy data between User i(Ui) and Access and Mobility Management function (AMF), so that the data will not be exposed to third-party attackers. Compared with other schemes, the scheme proposed in this paper is simple in deployment, low in computational overhead, and simple in process, and does not require the help of PKI system. The security analysis also verifies that the scheme can accurately protect the slice selection privacy data between Ui and AMF.

In an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), the electric utility collects power consumption data from smart meters to improve energy optimization and provides detailed information on power consumption to electric utility customers. However, AMI is vulnerable to data falsification attacks, which organized adversaries can launch. Such attacks can be detected by analyzing customers' fine-grained power consumption data; however, analyzing customers' private data violates the customers' privacy. Although homomorphic encryption-based schemes have been proposed to tackle the problem, the disadvantage is a long execution time. This paper proposes a new privacy-preserving data falsification detection scheme to shorten the execution time. We adopt elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) based on homomorphic encryption (HE) without revealing customer power consumption data. HE is a form of encryption that permits users to perform computations on the encrypted data without decryption. Through ECC, we can achieve light computation. Our experimental evaluation showed that our proposed scheme successfully achieved 18 times faster than the CKKS scheme, a common HE scheme.

Smart grids are envisioned as the next-generation electricity grids. The data measured from the smart grid is very sensitive. It is thus highly necessary to adopt data access control in smart grids to guarantee the security and privacy of the measured data. Due to its flexibility and scalability, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is widely utilized to realize data access control in smart grids. However, most existing ABE solutions impose a heavy decryption overhead on their users. To this end, we propose a lightweight attribute-based encryption scheme for data access control in smart grids by adopting the idea of computation outsourcing. Under our proposed scheme, users can outsource a large amount of computation to a server during the decryption phase while still guaranteeing the security and privacy of the data. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the existing schemes by achieving a very low decryption cost.