Cyber-Physical Attacks Targeting Communication-Assisted Protection Schemes

Abstract

The dependence of modern societies on electric energy is ever increasing by the emergence of smart cities and electric vehicles. This is while unprecedented number of cyberphysical hazards are threatening the integrity and availability of the power grid on a daily basis. On one hand, physical integrity of power systems is under threat by more frequent natural disasters and intentional attacks. On the other hand, the cyber vulnerability of power grids is on the rise by the emergence of smart grid technologies. This underlines an imminent need for the modeling and examination of power grid vulnerabilities to cyber-physical attacks. This paper examines the vulnerability of the communication-assisted protection schemes like permissive overreaching transfer trip (POTT) to cyberattacks using a co-simulation platform. The simulation results show that the transient angle stability of power systems can be jeopardized by cyberattacks on the communication-assisted protection schemes. To address this vulnerability two physical solutions including the deployment of communication channel redundancy, and a more advanced communicated-assisted protection scheme, i.e. DCUB, are considered and tested. The proposed solutions address the vulnerability of the communication-assisted protection schemes to distributed denial of service attack to some extent. Yet, the simulation results show the vulnerability of the proposed solutions to sophisticated cyberattacks like false data injection attacks. This highlights the need for the development of cyberbased solutions for communication channel monitoring.

Transmission and distribution co‐simulation: a review and propositions

“…Co‐simulation has been applied in many different engineering domains including automotive, electricity production and distribution, energy and environmental life, IC design, maritime, and robotics. Several related references regard to co‐simulation in electrical systems are listed below: Cyber‐physical power systems: [1–11]. Mechanical and electrical co‐simulation in power systems [12].…”

Risk Assessment of Smart Substation Relay Protection System Based on Markov Model and Risk Transfer Network

“…Therefore, it is usually utilized for reliability analysis of the protection system. For the general Markov theory [38], one can get: 11 12 1n (1) which meets the following conditions: In a smart substation, and in order to achieve the secondary equipment's state evaluation and risk evaluation, it is necessary to evaluate the failure rate of all devices shown in Figure 1. In this paper, the devices with the same hardware structure and function are classified, which requires one to find out the failure rate of bus PD, line PD, main transformer PD, network switch, merging unit, and intelligent terminal device.…”

“…In order to adapt to the development of high-voltage levels and long-distance transmissions technologies, smart substations have made rapid developments in China. Nowadays, with the increase in power grids' voltage levels, the corresponding technical parameters of the primary equipment should be improved accordingly [1,2]. As a result, their costs are greatly increased as well.…”

Cyber Attacks on Power System Automation and Protection and Impact Analysis

“…In related work, cyber attacks on various protections schemes, such as distance and differential protection, are discussed in [8]- [10]. Additionally, [11] proposes a mitigation measure for cyber attacks targeting distance protection through deep learning.…”