Man-in-The-Middle Attacks and Defense in a Power System Cyber-Physical Testbed
This addresses security vulnerabilities in smart grids for stakeholders like researchers and industry, but it is incremental as it builds on existing testbed and detection approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of stealthy Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attacks in smart grids, which can cause false data and command injections leading to physical contingencies, and demonstrates these attacks in a cyber-physical testbed while presenting detection mechanisms using intrusion detection systems and network monitoring tools.
Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attacks present numerous threats to a smart grid. In a MiTM attack, an intruder embeds itself within a conversation between two devices to either eavesdrop or impersonate one of the devices, making it appear to be a normal exchange of information. Thus, the intruder can perform false data injection (FDI) and false command injection (FCI) attacks that can compromise power system operations, such as state estimation, economic dispatch, and automatic generation control (AGC). Very few researchers have focused on MiTM methods that are difficult to detect within a smart grid. To address this, we are designing and implementing multi-stage MiTM intrusions in an emulation-based cyber-physical power system testbed against a large-scale synthetic grid model to demonstrate how such attacks can cause physical contingencies such as misguided operation and false measurements. MiTM intrusions create FCI, FDI, and replay attacks in this synthetic power grid. This work enables stakeholders to defend against these stealthy attacks, and we present detection mechanisms that are developed using multiple alerts from intrusion detection systems and network monitoring tools. Our contribution will enable other smart grid security researchers and industry to develop further detection mechanisms for inconspicuous MiTM attacks.