Highly Available Smart Grid Control Centers through Intrusion Tolerance

TL;DR

This paper proposes an intrusion tolerant architecture for smart grid control centers to enhance security and availability against cyber threats, using diversity, rejuvenation, and a semi-Markov model for evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel intrusion tolerant system architecture with multiple modules and features, including diversity and fine-grained rejuvenation, tailored for smart grid control centers.

Findings

Improved availability and security failure time compared to existing architectures.

Effective use of diversity and rejuvenation enhances resilience.

SLA viability as a performance metric is demonstrated.

Abstract

Societies' norms of operation relies on the proper and secure functioning of several critical infrastructures, particularly modern power grid which is also known as smart grid. Smart grid is interwoven with the information and communication technology infrastructure, and thus it is exposed to cyber security threats. Intrusion tolerance proves a promising security approach against malicious attacks and contributes to enhance the resilience and security of the key components of smart grid, mainly SCADA and control centers. Hence, an intrusion tolerant system architecture for smart grid control centers is proposed in this paper. The proposed architecture consists of several modules namely, replication & diversity, compromised/faulty replica detector, reconfiuration, auditing and proxy. Some of distinctive features of the proposed ITS are diversity as well as the combined and fine-grained rejuvenation approach. The security of the proposed architecture is evaluated with regard to availability and mean time to security failure as performance measures. The analysis is conducted using a Discrete Time Semi Markov Model and the acquired results show improvements compared to two established intrusion tolerant architectures. The viability of SLA as another performance metric is also investigated.