Ajay Chhokra, Carlos Barreto, Abhishek Dubey, Gabor Karsai, Xenofon Koutsoukos
9th Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, MSCPES@CPSIoTWeek 2021
As power systems become increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks, developing tools for attack simulation and mitigation analysis is critical for system security. This work is innovative because it provides an integrated tool-chain combining high-level domain-specific languages with detailed physical layer simulation. The approach enables security analysts to quickly specify complex attack scenarios and evaluate system responses.
This paper presents Power-Attack, a comprehensive tool-chain for modeling and simulating cyber attacks in power systems. The system includes a domain-specific language for defining attack scenarios and a scalable simulation engine that models both physical layer dynamics and protection system components. The framework enables evaluation of protection relay responses and overall system behavior under various attack conditions.
The Power-Attack framework was evaluated on IEEE 39 bus systems and demonstrated effectiveness in simulating various cyber attack scenarios. The tool-chain successfully modeled both device attacks and data attacks on protection systems. The simulation results demonstrated how different attacks affect frequency stability and identified specific vulnerabilities in protection system configurations.
@inproceedings{ajay2021powerattack,
author = {Chhokra, Ajay and Barreto, Carlos and Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor and Koutsoukos, Xenofon},
booktitle = {9th Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, MSCPES@CPSIoTWeek},
title = {Power-Attack: A comprehensive tool-chain for modeling and simulating attacks in power systems},
year = {2021},
abstract = {Due to the increased deployment of novel communication, control and protection functions, the grid has become vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Designing robust machine learning based attack detection and mitigation algorithms require large amounts of data that rely heavily on a representative environment, where different attacks can be simulated. This paper presents a comprehensive tool-chain for modeling and simulating attacks in power systems. The paper makes the following contributions, first, we present a probabilistic domain specific language to define multiple attack scenarios and simulation configuration parameters. Secondly, we extend the PyPower-dynamics simulator with protection system components to simulate cyber attacks in control and protection layers of power system. In the end, we demonstrate multiple attack scenarios with a case study based on IEEE 39 bus system.},
category = {workshop},
contribution = {colab},
keywords = {power systems, cyber security, attack simulation, domain-specific language, protection systems},
project = {cps-reliability},
tag = {platform,power}
}