Securing Substations through Command Authentication Using On-the-fly Simulation of Power System Dynamics

Abstract

There are increasing concerns that cyber attackers may inject malicious remote control commands into smart grid systems, as witnessed in the Ukraine incidents in 2015 and 2016 and the recent CrashOverride malware campaign. To counter such risks, command authentication mechanisms, which evaluate the legitimacy and validity of each remote control command based on the up-to-date power grid status and context, can be deployed near the edge of smart grid infrastructure (e.g., in substations) as an additional line of defense. However, many of the state-of the-art command authentication schemes only utilize steady-state power flow information, which does not capture all details of power grid behaviors in the transient state as well as cascading effects. Therefore, they may overlook indication of significant grid instability triggered by malicious commands. In this paper, we propose the use of on-the-fly power system dynamics simulation for command authentication to overcome such limitations. We also discuss system architecture and design considerations on longer simulation latency towards the practical deployment of the enhanced command authentication system.