Secure the Electrical Power Grid: Smart Grid versus Smart Attacks

Growing energy demands and environmental concerns have significantly increased the interest of academia, industry, and governments in the development of a smart electric power grid. Security is one of the key aspects of the power systems. The objective of our research in this project is to advance the understandings and principles of smart grid security, develop new methods of vulnerability analysis, and design innovative responses to maintain the integrity of power grids under complex attacks (e.g., cyber-attacks to the power grid).

Unlike many of the existing efforts that focuses on abstract topological structure or load-based analysis, our project considers both network topology and intrinsic power system characteristics to understand grid behavior in complex power grid attacks. In this poster, we will present our latest research on power grid single-node and multiple-node vulnerability analysis, new risk- aware metrics, risk-graph analysis, and cluster and regional-based attacks, and multifaceted attacks augmented by link failures. We will also present the development of the Smart Grid Security Demonstration in our group with the integration of real-world power system infrastructure data with the Geographical Information System (GIS). This demo will allow us to develop complex attack and defense algorithms and models, analyze power grid cascading failures, visualize and observe failure propagation and grid behavior, and support the decision- making process at different levels for the development of robust, secure, and reliable future smart grid systems.

Award ID: 1117314