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Title: Hiding Critical Targets in Smart Grid Networks

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1406352
 [1];
  1. Univ. of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR (United States)

With the integration of advanced communication technologies, the power grid is expected to greatly enhance efficiency and reliability of future power systems. However, since most electrical devices in power grid substations are connected via communication networks, cyber security of these communication networks becomes a critical issue. Real-World incidents such as Stuxnet have shown the feasibility of compromising a device in the power grid network to further launch more sophisticated attacks. To deal with security attacks of this spirit, this paper aims to hide critical targets from compromised internal nodes and hence protect them from further attacks launched by those compromised nodes. In particular, we consider substation networks and propose to add carefully-controlled dummy traffic to a substation network to make critical target nodes indistinguishable from other nodes in network traffic patterns. This paper describes the design and evaluation of such a scheme. Evaluations show that the scheme can effectively protect critical nodes with acceptable communication cost.

Research Organization:
University of Arkansas
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Electricity (OE)
DOE Contract Number:
OE0000779
OSTI ID:
1406352
Resource Relation:
Conference: IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm 2017), Dresden (Germany), 23-26 Oct 2017
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English