Developing cyber-physical experimental capabilities for the security analysis of the future Smart Grid

Abstract

During the evolution of today's power grid to a Smart Grid it is expected that IP-based communication protocols including Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, will form the basis of communications architecture for substation and distribution automation, advanced metering and home area networking applications. However, this will lead to many Smart Grid security challenges - a forecast that is supported by the vulnerability of current SCADA systems. In this paper we examine how our experimental framework that has been developed for the modeling and simulation of local power plants can be extended and efficiently used for the study of complex wide area environments such as the future Smart Grid. We show that our framework is flexible enough to be easily extended with components for satisfying the requirements of a complex environment as the future Smart Grid. The main contribution of the paper is that it proposes a framework for experimenting with the Smart Grid that can be used by researchers to recreate an experimentation environment for measuring and understanding the consequences of cyber attacks on the Smart Grid. The paper also presents the study of a cyber attack involving compromised control hardware and the IEEE 9-bus system. The results confirm that we can experimentally recreate and study oscillations in the power grid caused by adversaries that attack the system through its IP-based control subsystem.