A Real-time Cyber-Physical Simulation Testbed for Cybersecurity Assessment of Power Systems

This paper presents a real-time simulation testbed for cyber-physical power systems, which incorporates real-time simulations of power grids and real-time emulation of communication networks. By simulating the power grid model in real-time, physical hardware such as protective relays, monitoring devices, and automation controllers, can be integrated into the simulation loop, providing a realistic representation of power system operations. The network communication system within the testbed includes information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems, which enable a comprehensive assessment of the impact of cybersecurity issues on power systems. Automation is achieved through multiple scripts to simulate power grids and perform adaptive cyber attacks on communication networks. These scripts allow the testbed to simulate a large number of scenarios with minimal effort, which is crucial in collecting data for training machine learning models. Various types of attacks on the IT and OT networks, including phishing email attacks, credential-related attacks, network scan attacks, and denial of service attacks, will be conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the simulation testbed.