Co-simulation for Cyber Security Analysis: Data Attacks against Energy Management System
This work addresses vulnerability assessment for energy management systems against data attacks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing analytic frameworks and simulation tools.
The paper tackles the challenge of assessing vulnerability in cyber-physical power systems to data attacks by developing a co-simulation platform that couples power system, communication network, and EMS simulators, and results indicate the vulnerability of EMS to such attacks.
It is challenging to assess the vulnerability of a cyber-physical power system to data attacks from an integral perspective. In order to support vulnerability assessment except analytic analysis, suitable platform for security tests needs to be developed. In this paper we analyze the cyber security of energy management system (EMS) against data attacks. First we extend our analytic framework that characterizes data attacks as optimization problems with the objectives specified as security metrics and constraints corresponding to the communication network properties. Second, we build a platform in the form of co-simulation - coupling the power system simulator DIgSILENT PowerFactory with communication network simulator OMNeT++, and Matlab for EMS applications (state estimation, optimal power flow). Then the framework is used to conduct attack simulations on the co-simulation based platform for a power grid test case. The results indicate how vulnerable of EMS to data attacks and how co-simulation can help assess vulnerability.