Cyber-Security in Smart Grid: Survey and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of cybersecurity challenges in smart grids, analyzing attacks, vulnerabilities, and proposing a strategic approach to enhance security across the entire system.

Contribution

It offers a holistic review of security requirements, attack types, vulnerabilities, and introduces a unified cybersecurity strategy for smart grids.

Findings

Identified key cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities in smart grids.

Proposed a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

Highlighted future research directions.

Abstract

Smart grid uses the power of information technology to intelligently deliver energy to customers by using a two-way communication, and wisely meet the environmental requirements by facilitating the integration of green technologies. Although smart grid addresses several problems of the traditional grid, it faces a number of security challenges. Because communication has been incorporated into the electrical power with its inherent weaknesses, it has exposed the system to numerous risks. Several research papers have discussed these problems. However, most of them classified attacks based on confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and they excluded attacks which compromise other security criteria such as accountability. In addition, the existed security countermeasures focus on countering some specific attacks or protecting some specific components, but there is no global approach which combines these solutions to secure the entire system. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the relevant published works. First, we review the security requirements. Then, we investigate in depth a number of important cyber-attacks in smart grid to diagnose the potential vulnerabilities along with their impact. In addition, we proposed a cyber security strategy as a solution to address breaches, counter attacks, and deploy appropriate countermeasures. Finally, we provide some future research directions.