The technological leap of smart technologies has brought the conventional electrical grid in a new digital era called Smart Grid (SG), providing multiple benefits, such as two-way communication, pervasive control and self-healing. However, this new reality generates significant cybersecurity risks due to the heterogeneous and insecure nature of SG. In particular, SG relies on legacy communication protocols that have not been implemented having cybersecurity in mind. Moreover, the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) creates severe cybersecurity challenges. The Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems constitute an emerging technology in the cybersecurity area, having the capability to detect, normalise and correlate a vast amount of security events. They can orchestrate the entire security of a smart ecosystem, such as SG. Nevertheless, the current SIEM systems do not take into account the unique SG peculiarities and characteristics like the legacy communication protocols. In this paper, we present the Secure and PrivatE smArt gRid (SPEAR) SIEM, which focuses on SG. The main contribution of our work is the design and implementation of a SIEM system capable of detecting, normalising and correlating cyberattacks and anomalies against a plethora of SG application-layer protocols. It is noteworthy that the detection performance of the SPEAR SIEM is demonstrated with real data originating from four real SG use case (a) hydropower plant, (b) substation, (c) power plant and (d) smart home.
Blockchain technology is currently being adopted in several domains and applications, including the energy domain and specifically in smart grids. One of the principal applications of blockchain technology is peer-to-peer energy trading among stakeholders of smart grids, providing trusted transactions without the need of third parties. Also, e-auctions are rapidly growing as a means of e-commerce that allows direct product bidding through the internet, but where mutual trust may otherwise be undermined by possible malicious sellers, buyers or third parties. This paper introduces a blockchain-based e-auction framework to offer a safe, trusted and privacy preserving energy exchange mechanism between EPES stakeholders of an islanded part of the grid. Furthermore, this framework utilises blockchain solutions for monitoring the security status of smart grid devices in order to confront any transactions involving malicious parties or parties with compromised equipment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.