THE GAME-THEORETIC AND MODEL-BASED METHOD FOR ANALYSIS OF POWER SYSTEM CYBER-PHYSICAL SECURITY

Md Touhiduzzaman

Concerns for the cybersecurity of the power network has increased due to the recent cyber-attack on Ukrainian power grid [1]. While the NERC-CIP standards ensure the U.S. grid maintains some level of protection, there are remaining questions of how to identify the set of security controls (e.g., VPN, firewalls) and system categorizations that most accurately reflect the grid’s risk against cyberattack. This motivates to study cyber-attacks on the power grid that affect both the power grid planning and operation application. In this work, a graph-based cyber-physical modeling architecture is developed by considering the cybersecurity defensive strategies for performing cyber-security analysis in the power grid network. The graphical characterization of the cyber-physical model is useful for both defending and attacking the ICT system of the smart grid as they provide intuitive visualization of some complex problem structures; and enables efficient game theoretic and model-based solution algorithms. First, the substation criticality ranking and the cybersecurity control ranking has been proposed by analyzing the graph-based security graph that provides a guideline for choosing appropriate security mechanism and identifies the impact for cyberattack (e.g., switching attack such as unplanned circuit breaker trip). Second, the non-atomic selfish routing game is applied in the proposed cyber-physical security graph to find the worst-case attack path and help the operator to focus on appropriate power grid planning. The proposed routing games considered a different type of cyber vulnerabilities in the power system and calculated the cost function of each attack path by using the proposed vulnerability assessment scheme (VAS). Third, a graph coloring game is proposed to identify an optimal allocation decision of security control that ensures the highest-level security and reduce the attack propagation in the power grid. The payoff of this graph coloring game is related to the security index of security control that considers the physical impact of the substation and the difficulty of cyber-attack. Finally, an agent-based cyber-physical security framework is modeled by considering IEC 61850 that distributively identified the cyber-attack at substation automation; and analyze the attacker activity across every stage of attack sequence in protection operation and differentiate the cyber event and normal fault.

THE GAME-THEORETIC AND MODEL-BASED METHOD FOR ANALYSIS OF POWER SYSTEM CYBER-PHYSICAL SECURITY

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