Threat Landscape for Smart Grid Systems

TL;DR

This paper surveys the threat landscape of smart grid systems, highlighting specific security threats, their potential consequences, detection features, and mitigation methods to enhance grid resilience.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of threats to smart grids, assessing their severity and discussing detection and mitigation strategies, which is a novel consolidation in this domain.

Findings

Identifies specific threats to smart grid infrastructure

Assesses severity and potential consequences of attacks

Discusses detection features and mitigation methods

Abstract

Smart Grids are energy delivery networks, constituting an evolution of power grids, in which a bidirectional flow between power providers and consumers is established. These flows support the transfer of electricity and information, in order to support automation actions in the context of the energy delivery network. Insofar, many smart grid implementations and implementation proposals have emerged, with varying degrees of feature delivery and sophistication. While smart grids offer many advantages, their distributed nature and information flow streams between energy producers and consumers enable the launching of a number of attacks against the smart grid infrastructure, where the related consequences may range from economic loss to complete failure of the smart grid. In this paper, we survey the threat landscape of smart grids, identifying threats that are specific to this infrastructure, providing an assessment of the severity of the consequences of each attack type, discerning features that can be utilized to detect attacks and listing methods that can be used to mitigate them.