Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures – A Survey on the Cyber Security Issues in the Transmission Subsystem of a Smart Grid

Authors

  • Yi Deng Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech,Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA
  • Sandeep Shukla Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech,Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13052/jcsm2245-1439.1236

Keywords:

smart grid cyber security, cyber attacks, synchrophasor technology, phasor measurement unit (PMU), wide area measurement system (WAMS), power system monitoring, power system protection, power system control

Abstract

With the increased investment and deployment of embedded computing and communication technologies in the power system – the smart grid vision is shaping up into a reality. The future power grid is a large cyber physical system (CPS) which is vulnerable to cyber security threats. Among the three major subsystems of a power grid – generation, transmission and distribution – this survey focuses on the transmission subsystem because most of the cyberization of the grid has been happening in this subsystem. This is due to the need for distributed measurement, monitoring and control to retain the stability, security, and reliability of power transmission system. Given the geographically dispersed generation facilities, substations, control centers, data concentrators etc., efficient data communication is required, and therefore large scale networking – either proprietary or leased – is happening. The goal of this paper is not to be comprehensive to include all efforts of securing the transmission system from cyber borne threats, but to provide a survey of various vulnerabilities, and countermeasures proposed by various research efforts. One of the focus area in this survey is the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) technology – mostly due to our familiarity with the issues for this specific technology deployment – rather than any attempt to indicate that this is the most vulnerable technology in the transmission subsystem. Our hope is that this survey will familiarize any uninitiated reader with the issues and provide incentive to undertake systematic research programs to thwart cyber attacks on our national power delivery infrastructure.

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Author Biographies

Yi Deng, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech,Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA

Yi Deng (M’12) received the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2005 and 2010 respectively. He is currently a postdoctoral associate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic and State University in Blacksburg (Virginia Tech). His research interests include synchrophasor measurement technology, power system monitoring protection and control, communication in smart gird, and smart gird cybersecurity. Dr. Deng’s research also covers signal processing, high-performance embedded computing (HPEC), hardware software co-design.

Sandeep Shukla, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech,Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA

Sandeep K. Shukla (M’99, SM’02) received the bachelor’s degree in 1991 from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and the master’s and PhD degrees in computer science in 1995 and 1997, respectively, from the State University of New York at Albany. He is an associate professor of computer engineering at Virginia Polytechnic and State University in Blacksburg (Virginia Tech),where he has been a faculty member since 2002. He is also a founder and director of the Center for Embedded Systems for Critical Applications (CESCA) and director of the FERMAT research lab. He has published more than 150 articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings, and has published eight books. He was awarded the PECASE (Presidential Early Career Awardfor Scientists and Engineers) award for his research in design automation for embedded systems design, which in particular focuses on system level design languages, formal methods, formal specification languages, probabilistic modeling and model checking, dynamic power management, application of stochastic models and model analysis tools for fault-tolerant nano-scale system design, reliability measurement of fault-tolerant nano-systems, and embedded software engineering. Professor Shukla was elected a College of Engineering Faculty fellow at Virginia Tech in 2004. He is a distinguished visitor of the IEEE Computer Society, a distinguished speaker of the ACM,and a senior member of the IEEE and ACM. He worked at GTE labs and Intel Corporation between 1997 and 2001. He was a researcher at the Centerfor Embedded Computer Systems at the University of California at Irvine. In 2007, Professor Shukla received a Distinguished Alumni award from the State University of New York at Albany for Excellence in Science and Technology. In 2008, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

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Published

2012-04-25

How to Cite

1.
Deng Y, Shukla S. Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures – A Survey on the Cyber Security Issues in the Transmission Subsystem of a Smart Grid. JCSANDM [Internet]. 2012 Apr. 25 [cited 2024 Nov. 24];1(2-3):250-76. Available from: https://journals.riverpublishers.com/index.php/JCSANDM/article/view/6115

Issue

2012: Vol 1 Iss 2-3

Section

Articles