Assessment of Protection Schemes and their Security under Denial of Service Attacks

The widespread use of information and communication technology in today's electrical grid makes it increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks resulting in major operational and security issues. The efficiency assessment of cyber threats and their negative impact on the system is important but challenging to detect, mitigate, or prevent. Conducting such evaluation on real systems infrastructure is impractical or even impossible. In this paper, we discuss the capabilities that we have in our laboratory facilities at the FIU's smart grid testbed research facility. The testbed was built as an integrated hardware-based AC/DC system where the hardware, software, and communication-based technology can be used to envision a complete Cyber-Physical smart grid framework. Our focus is on the substation automation system where we discuss the IEC 61850 security vulnerabilities and further assess the effect of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on the physical system. The DoS is being performed in two forms flooding attack and GOOSE poisoning attack. A case study of a transmission line fault of the proposed protection scheme is being conducted. Comparison and evaluation of the impact of DoS cyber-attacks on the physical system are discussed. The experimental results showed the impact of DoS attacks on the protection scheme's dependability and security, where the need to develop detection and mitigation techniques to overcome the IEC 61850 vulnerabilities.