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CC BY V4.0, Open Access
Dissertation
Cyber risk analysis and threat mitigation strategies against Distributed Energy Resources and Internet of Things infrastructure attacks
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005459
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/118955
Abstract
Distributed Energy Resources penetration levels continue to increase across distribution networks, producing a wide variety of challenges for system operators. Creating among others, the need for new or improved methods that can manage their output characteristics. This has led to regulatory amendments that are expected to facilitate secure grid operations while continuing to enable increasing levels of Distributed Energy Resources penetration. However, it is still unclear if these systems will behave as intended in the presence of a cyber attack.
To address this fundamental question, this work presents a detailed cybersecurity analysis on Distributed Energy Resources and Internet of Things infrastructure, covering a wide variety of angles from assessing device-level vulnerabilities to proposing methods/metrics that can quantify risk at the system-level. In addition, this work introduces two, fully-virtualized cyber-physical testbeds that have been envisioned for cyber-security researchers. It is expected that these software-based tools can aid to develop better, more secure Internet of Things and Distributed Energy Resource-based deployments.
Furthermore, methods for ensuring correct operation at the device-level and distribution system-level are presented. In specific, a Trusted Execution Environment solution, which relies on hardware-level process isolation has been developed to provide digital-attestation services on analog inputs. The final contribution of this work is the development of a distributed fail-safe method for managing Volt-Var operations. The proposed method combines local voltage information (from independent agents) and simplified network models to determine the expected voltage output before actually executing the command using consensus-voting techniques. The underlying distributed consensus methods and power models work together to ensure that a final decision not only satisfies traditional power system constraints such as security (correctness) and dependability but also availability and partition tolerance under distributed systems theory.
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Details
- Title
- Cyber risk analysis and threat mitigation strategies against Distributed Energy Resources and Internet of Things infrastructure attacks
- Creators
- David Jonathan Sebastian Cardenas
- Contributors
- Adam Hahn (Advisor)Anurag Srivastava (Committee Member)Anjan Bose (Committee Member)David Bakken (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 339
- Identifiers
- 99900599357401842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation