A Language and Repository for Cyber Security of Smart Grids

Power grids form the central critical infrastructure in all developed economies. Disruptions of power supply can cause major effects on the economy and the livelihood of citizens. At the same time, power grids are being targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks. To counter these threats, we propose a domain-specific language and a repository to represent power grids and related IT components that control the power grid. We apply our tool to a standard example used in the literature to assess its expressiveness.

I. Introduction

The Smart Grid language and repository aim at categorizing the list of involved components and splitting them into a set of meaningful concepts and relationships. The proposed smart grid elements are distinguished according to their types, namely power and cyber elements. This distinction is used for visual arrangement of physical and control components and their event-driven interaction. The smart grid taxonomy is intended for individuals seeking an overview of smart grids in terms of inventory and valid relationships in the process of enhancing security attributes or investigating threat scenarios. It also enhances correctness and productivity of smart grid model specification by using well-defined concepts and relationships. This paper proposes a taxonomy framework for the specification of smart-grid architecture instances. The framework includes a specification language for interaction logics and component architectural-diagrams.