May 31, 2017
Journal Article

Cyber-Physical Attack-Resilient Wide-Area Monitoring, Protection, and Control for the Power Grid

Abstract

Cyber security and resiliency of Wide-Area Monitoring, Protection and Control (WAMPAC) applications is critically important to ensure secure, reliable, and economic operation of the bulk power system. WAMPAC relies heavily on the security of measurements and control commands transmitted over wide-area communication networks for real-time operational, protection, and control functions. Also, the current “N-1 security criteria” for grid operation is inadequate to address malicious cyber events and therefore it is important to fundamentally redesign WAMPAC and to enhance Energy Management System (EMS) applications to make them attack-resilient. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end defense-in-depth architecture for attack-resilient WAMPAC that addresses resilience at both the infrastructure layer and the application layers. Also, we propose an attack-resilient cyber-physical security framework that encompasses the entire security life cycle including risk assessment, attack prevention, attack detection, attack mitigation, and attack resilience. The overarching objective of this paper is to provide a broad scope that comprehensively describes most of the major research issues and potential solutions in the context of cyber-physical security of WAMPAC for the power grid.

Revised: July 18, 2017 | Published: May 31, 2017

Citation

Ashok A., M. Govindarasu, and J. Wang. 2017. Cyber-Physical Attack-Resilient Wide-Area Monitoring, Protection, and Control for the Power Grid. Proceedings of the IEEE 105, no. 7:1389-1407. PNNL-SA-120681. doi:10.1109/JPROC.2017.2686394