Biblio

Cyber-Physical-Systems are subject to cyber-attacks due to existing vulnerabilities in the various components constituting them. System Resiliency is concerned with the extent the system is able to bounce back to a normal state under attacks. In this paper, two communication Networks are analyzed, formally described, and modeled using Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL), identifying their architecture, connections, vulnerabilities, resources, possible attack instances as well as their pre-and post-conditions. The generated network models are then verified against a security property using JKind model checker integrated tool. The union of the generated attack sequences/scenarios resulting in overall network compromise (given by its loss of stability) is the Attack graph. The generated Attack graph is visualized graphically using Unity software, and then used to assess the worst Level of Resilience for both networks.

Transactive energy systems (TES) are emerging as a transformative solution for the problems that distribution system operators face due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and rapid growth in scalability of managing active distribution system (ADS). On the one hand, these changes pose a decentralized power system control problem, requiring strategic control to maintain reliability and resiliency for the community and for the utility. On the other hand, they require robust financial markets while allowing participation from diverse prosumers. To support the computing and flexibility requirements of TES while preserving privacy and security, distributed software platforms are required. In this paper, we enable the study and analysis of security concerns by developing Transactive Energy Security Simulation Testbed (TESST), a TES testbed for simulating various cyber attacks. In this work, the testbed is used for TES simulation with centralized clearing market, highlighting weaknesses in a centralized system. Additionally, we present a blockchain enabled decentralized market solution supported by distributed computing for TES, which on one hand can alleviate some of the problems that we identify, but on the other hand, may introduce newer issues. Future study of these differing paradigms is necessary and will continue as we develop our security simulation testbed.

The Internet of Things (IoT) era envisions billions of interconnected devices capable of providing new interactions between the physical and digital worlds, offering new range of content and services. At the fundamental level, IoT nodes are physical devices that exist in the real world, consisting of networking, sensor, and processing components. Some application examples include mobile and pervasive computing or sensor nets, and require distributed device deployment that feed information into databases for exploitation. While the data can be centralized, there are advantages, such as system resiliency and security to adopting a decentralized architecture that pushes the computation and storage to the network edge and onto IoT devices. However, these devices tend to be much more limited in computation power than traditional racked servers. This research explores using the Cassandra distributed database on IoT-representative device specifications. Experiments conducted on both virtual machines and Raspberry Pi's to simulate IoT devices, examined latency issues with network compression, processing workloads, and various memory and node configurations in laboratory settings. We demonstrate that distributed databases are feasible on Raspberry Pi's as IoT representative devices and show findings that may help in application design.