On using contextual correlation to detect multi-stage cyber attacks in smart grids

Abstract

While the digitization of the distribution grids brings numerous benefits to grid operations, it also increases the risks imposed by serious cyber security threats such as coordinated, timed attacks. Addressing this new threat landscape requires an advanced security approach beyond established preventive IT security measures such as encryption, network segmentation, or access control. Here, detective capabilities and reactive countermeasures as part of incident response strategies promise to complement nicely the security-by-design approach by providing cyber security situational awareness. However, manually evaluating extensive cyber intelligence within a reasonable timeframe requires an unmanageable effort to process a large amount of cross-domain information. An automated procedure is needed to systematically process and correlate the various cyber intelligence to correctly assess the situation to reduce the manuel effort and support security operations. In this paper, we present an approach that leverages cyber intelligence from multiple sources to detect multi-stage cyber attacks that threaten the smart grid. We investigate the detection quality of the presented correlation approach and discuss the results to highlight the challenges in automated methods for contextual assessment and understanding of the cyber security situation.