CyPhyMASC: Evolutionary monitoring, analysis, sharing and control platform for SmartGrid defense

Abstract

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) promise advances towards smarter infrastructure systems and services, significantly enhancing their reliability, performance and safety. SmartGrids are a typical example of CPS. Current SmartGrids Monitoring, Analysis, Sharing, and Control (MASC) technologies offer disparate and largely inadequate services for the realization of effective, pervasive, and efficient smart grid defense. Most current technologies did not consider that cyber and physical convergence needs a new paradigm to treat cyber and physical components seamlessly. Further, information sharing was severely curtailed by enforcing parameter defense to preserve the privacy of the Target-of-Defense system (ToD). These limitations negatively impact the quality, reliability, survivability, and promptness of defense services. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary sensory and effecting tool, CyPhyMASC, towards realizing pervasive MASC for enhanced SmartGrid defense. CyPhyMASC is unique in that it acts as a generic middle layer between the Defense Service Provider(s) (DSPs) and the ToD(s) creating a uniform defense interface that hides ToD's scale and heterogeneity aspects from Control and Management. Such isolation and uniform representation facilitated interoperable defense services. CyPhyMASC intelligently mixes and matches heterogeneous tools and control logic from various sources towards continually evolving defense missions. CyPhyMASC is also elastic where situation-driven MASC solutions can be dispatched through a dynamic set of sensor and effector software capsules to the ToD rather than using pre-deployed MASC components. DSPs use CyPhyMASC to circulate these capsules into the ToD "body" to provide pervasive and scalable MASC services. Using analysis and simulation, our results demonstrate that CyPhyMASC can enhance detection and resolution promptness and sensitivity to multi-threaded widespread attacks while conserving considerable amount of ToD resources.