February 28, 2017: Invited Speaker Seminar: CCPA: Coordinated Cyber-Physical Attacks and Countermeasures in Smart Grid

Ruilong Deng, Ph.D.
Zhejiang University

Tuesday, February 28, 2017 at 11:15 am

Room EV011.119

Abstract

Smart grid, as one of the most critical infrastructures, is vulnerable to a wide variety of cyber and/or physical attacks. Recently, a new category of threats to smart grid, named coordinated cyber-physical attacks (CCPAs), are emerging. A key feature of CCPAs is to leverage cyber-attacks to mask physical attacks which can cause power outages and potentially trigger cascading failures.

In this talk, we investigate CCPAs in smart grid and show that an adversary can carefully synthesize a false data injection attack vector based on phasor measurement unit (PMU) measurements to neutralize the impact of physical attack vector, such that CCPAs could circumvent bad data detection without being detected. Specifically, we present two potential CCPAs, namely replay and optimized CCPAs, respectively, and analyze the adversary's required capability to construct them. Based on the analytical results, countermeasures are proposed to detect the two kinds of CCPAs, through known-secure PMU measurement verification (in the cyber space) and online tracking of the power system equivalent impedance (in the physical space), respectively. The implementation of CCPAs in smart grid and the effectiveness of countermeasures are demonstrated by using an illustrative 4-bus power system and the IEEE 9-bus, 14-bus, 30-bus, 118-bus, and 300-bus test power systems.

Biography

Ruilong Deng received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees both in Control Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, in 2009 and 2014, respectively. He was a Visiting Scholar at Simula Research Laboratory, Fornebu, Norway, in 2011, and the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, from 2012 to 2013. He was a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, from 2014 to 2015. Currently, he is an AITF Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada. His research interests include smart grid, cyber security, and wireless sensor network.

Dr. Deng serves/served as an Editor for IEEE/KICS Journal of Communications and Networks, and a Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing. He also serves/served as a Technical Program Committee (TPC) Member for IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE SmartGridComm, EAI SGSC, etc. He is the recipient of 2016 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PES-GM) Best Conference Papers Award, and the author of 3 ESI Highly Cited Papers.