Transient Analysis of Cyber-Attacks on Power SCADA using RTDS

Abstract

Cyber security in the SCADA domain has become one of the major concerns of all the stakeholders in the energy sector. The SCADA architecture that the power industry adopts is drawing more attention from a dedicated cyber attacker due to the extent of damage a catastrophe can promise. The usage of open standard protocols for communication among SCADA components that are not designed with security in mind is one of those vulnerable areas for any attacker. The SCADA components in the control region viz., the MTU and the RTU communicate via these insecurely designed open protocols without any authentication. An attacker can target this communication; launch an attack like the manin- the-middle attack resulting in a disastrous situation. An experiment was conducted at CPRI using their Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) simulating a substation to study the impact of an attack. This paper brings out the details of the experiment conducted and the results thus obtained.