Introduction

Overview

With the integration of computing, communication, and physical processes, the modern power grid is becoming a large and complex cyber physical power system (CPPS). This trend is intended to modernize and improve the efficiency of the power grid, yet it makes the CPPS vulnerable to potential cascading failures caused by cyber-attacks at the same time. To prevent these risks, it is essential to analyze how cyber-attacks can be conducted against the CPPS and how they can affect the power systems. Our interests focus on modeling the CPPS, assessing the CPPS by doing co-simulations and analyzing new kinds of cyber-attacks that might cause cascading failure to the smart grid. Except for mathematical analysis and software simulations, we also try to conduct real world experiment on testbeds to find the vulnerabilities of the CPPS.

Assessing Cyber-Physical Power System using Integrated Co-simulation Platform

It is universally agreed that more advanced computational and communication technologies will be integrated into the power system to carry the control system from local to wide area scope to enable an intelligent power grid. This demand for efficient co-simulation tools to carry out the performance assessment, rather than only existing stand-alone power grid simulator or a communication system simulator. In this project, we discuss the issue of co-simulation for cyber-physical power system (CPPS) consisting of electric power system and underlying communication system. We present the CPPS and traffic models, as well as a framework of CPPS co-simulator.

Identifying Vulnerable Nodes for Cyber-Physical Power Systems in the Presence of Cyber-Attacks

The growing dependence of critical infrastructures and industrial automation on smart grids has resulted in growing and unforeseen cyber security threatens to power systems. Identifying vulnerable nodes and analyzing the influence of undetectable attacks play an important role in defending cyber-attacks. In this project, our goal is to identify the nodes, at which attacks may occur but are not detectable based on the measurements for the power systems, and then further identify the vulnerable nodes by analyzing whether these undetectable attacks lead to damages to the power networks.

Security Analysis of SCADA Systems in Cyber-Physical Power Systems: Attacks and Countermeasures

SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition) is widely used in power systems for electric power dispatching. Communication is essential for SCADA system to collect the state of remote field devices and send control instructions to remote terminals. In this project, we analyze cyber threats to the SCADA systems caused by the integrating of wireless communication technologies, e.g. General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), which is the most widely used wireless communication in power systems because of its extensive coverage and sufficient bandwidth. We take SCADA systems which use GPRS as a case study and illustrate the serious impact of the attacks in a cyber-physical power system by simulation. We also to make the GPRS-based SCADA system secure from cyber-attacks by developing communication protocols implementing cryptographic algorithms.