Assessing DER network cybersecurity defences in a power‐communication co‐simulation environment

Abstract

Increasing penetrations of interoperable distributed energy resources (DER) in the electric power system are expanding the power system attack surface. Maloperation or malicious control of DER equipment can now cause substantial disturbances to grid operations. Fortunately, many options exist to defend and limit adversary impact on these newly-created DER communication networks, which typically traverse the public internet. However, implementing these security features will increase communication latency, thereby adversely impacting real-time DER grid support service effectiveness. In this work, a collection of software tools called SCEPTRE was used to create a co-simulation environment where SunSpec-compliant photovoltaic inverters were deployed as virtual machines and interconnected to simulated communication network equipment. Network segmentation, encryption, and moving target defence security features were deployed on the control network to evaluate their influence on cybersecurity metrics and power system performance. The results indicated that adding these security features did not impact DER-based grid control systems but improved the cybersecurity posture of the network when implemented appropriately.

Toward Quantum Secured Distributed Energy Resources: Adoption of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)

“…The attack model is generally divided into 9-12 steps [6,14,[50][51][52]. However, these steps can be briefly summarized as four steps according to certain goals: 1. collecting information and analyzing vulnerabilities; 2. selecting target, route, and means of attack; 3. attacking; and 4. eliminating traces.…”

“…The DER network also connects DERMS to utilities to keep the entire system stable [4][5][6][7][8]. As the amount and importance of information transmitted and received in the DER network also increase, the interest and importance of DER network security also increases [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Many standards have been established for the security of DER networks [10,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

Cybersecurity Considerations for Grid-Connected Batteries with Hardware Demonstrations

“…Advanced methods of cybersecurity traditionally applied to enterprise can also be adapted to DER environments [49,50]. These methods have been found to only minimally increase latency [51]. General best practices for securing DER networks are discussed in [10].…”

Advanced Laboratory Testing Methods Using Real-Time Simulation and Hardware-in-the-Loop Techniques: A Survey of Smart Grid International Research Facility Network Activities

“…Simulated PV inverters were created that interacted with the power system so that any changes to the controllers would be reflected in the power simulation and vice versa. An adversary-based (red team) assessment was performed for different cybersecurity defenses (segmentation, encryption, and moving target defense) in this environment and given a cybersecurity score [64,65].…”

“…This section contains SIRFN ALTM experiences including integration of RTSM to co-simulation platforms [59,60], network emulators, and cyber-physical systems in co-simulation and HIL [61][62][63], development of tools with enhanced cybersecurity features for co-simulation and HIL experiments [64,65], and integration via co-simulation of electrical vehicles charging station interfaces [66].…”