The development of a smarter electric grid will depend on increased deployments of information and communication technology (ICT) to support novel communication and control functions. Unfortunately, this additional dependency also expands the risk from cyber attacks. Designing systems with adequate cyber security depends heavily on the availability of representative environments, such as testbeds, where current issues and future ideas can be evaluated. This paper provides an overview of a smart grid security testbed, including the set of control, communication, and physical system components required to provide an accurate cyber-physical environment. It then identifies various testbed research applications and also identifies how various components support these applications. The PowerCyber testbed at Iowa State University is then introduced, including the architecture, applications, and novel capabilities, such as virtualization, Real Time Digital Simulators (RTDS), and ISEAGE WAN emulation. Finally, several attack scenarios are evaluated using the testbed to explore cyber-physical impacts. In particular, availability and integrity attacks are demonstrated with both isolated and coordinated approaches, these attacks are then evaluated based on the physical system's voltage and rotor angle stability.

Cyber-Physical Security Testbeds: Architecture, Application, and Evaluation for Smart Grid

An increasing interest is emerging on the development of smart grid cyber-physical system testbeds. As new communication and information technologies emerge, innovative cyber-physical system testbeds need to leverage realistic and scalable platforms. Indeed, the interdisciplinary structure of the smart grid concept compels heterogeneous testbeds with different capabilities. There is a significant need to evaluate new concepts and vulnerabilities as opposed to counting on solely simulation studies especially using hardware-in-the-loop test platforms. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on cyber-physical smart grid testbeds aiming to provide a taxonomy and insightful guidelines for the development as well as to identify the key features and design decisions while developing future smart grid testbeds. First, this survey provides a four step taxonomy based on smart grid domains, research goals, test platforms, and communication infrastructure. Then, we introduce an overview with a detailed discussion and an evaluation on existing testbeds from the literature. Finally, we conclude this paper with a look on future trends and developments in cyber-physical smart grid testbed research.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielaam/9739/7862305/7740849-aam.pdf

A Survey on Smart Grid Cyber-Physical System Testbeds

As part of the smart grid development, more and more technologies are developed and deployed on the power grid to enhance the system reliability. A primary purpose of the smart grid is to significantly increase the capability of computer-based remote control and automation. As a result, the level of connectivity has become much higher, and cyber security also becomes a potential threat to the cyber-physical systems (CPSs). In this paper, a survey of the state-of-the-art is conducted on the cyber security of the power grid concerning issues of: (1) the structure of CPSs in a smart grid; (2) cyber vulnerability assessment; (3) cyber protection systems; and (4) testbeds of a CPS. At Washington State University (WSU), the Smart City Testbed (SCT) has been developed to provide a platform to test, analyze and validate defense mechanisms against potential cyber intrusions. A test case is provided in this paper to demonstrate how a testbed helps the study of cyber security and the anomaly detection system (ADS) for substations.

/pdf/cyber-physical-system-security-of-a-power-grid-state-of-the-57xrrs00m1.pdf

Cyber-Physical System Security of a Power Grid: State-of-the-Art

Architecture and Security of SCADA Systems: A Review

Cyber-Physical Security Testbeds serve as valuable experimental platforms to implement and evaluate realistic, complex cyber attack-defense experiments. Testbeds, unlike traditional simulation platforms, capture communication, control and physical system characteristics and their interdependencies adequately in a unified environment. In this paper, we show how the PowerCyber CPS testbed at Iowa State was used to implement and evaluate cyber attacks on one of the fundamental Wide-Area Control applications, namely, the Automatic Generation Control (AGC). We provide a brief overview of the implementation of the experimental setup on the testbed. We then present a case study using the IEEE 9 bus system to evaluate the impacts of cyber attacks on AGC. Specifically, we analyzed the impacts of measurement based attacks that manipulated the tie-line and frequency measurements, and control based attacks that manipulated the ACE values sent to generators. We found that these attacks could potentially create under frequency conditions and could cause unnecessary load shedding. As part of future work, we plan to extend this work and utilize the experimental setup to implement other sophisticated, stealthy attack vectors and also develop attack-resilient algorithms to detect and mitigate such attacks.

Experimental evaluation of cyber attacks on Automatic Generation Control using a CPS Security Testbed

The proposed testbed of the cyber‐power system consists of power system simulation, substation automation, and the SCADA system. Scenarios for substation cyber security intrusions and anomaly detection concepts have been proposed. An attack tree method can be used to identify vulnerable substations and intrusions through remote access points. Specific substation vulnerability scenarios have been tested. Temporal anomaly is determined by data and information acquired at different time points. This is a metric to determine the anomaly between two snapshots. In a distributed intrusion detection algorithm, distributed agents are trained with a large number of scenarios and intended for real‐time applications. In a distributed environment, if an anomaly is detected by one agent, it is able to distribute critical information to other agents in the network.

Ahmed Fshosha

Papers

An intrusion and defense testbed in a cyber-power system environment