NSERC/Hydro-Québec/Thales Industrial Research Chair in Smart Grid Security: Detection, Prevention, Mitigation and Recovery from Cyber-Physical Attacks

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The current electric grid is considered as one of the best engineering achievements of the twentieth century. It was designed to deliver power to various consumer domains. To a large extent, it has been successful in fulfilling this objective. Nevertheless, the electric grid has experienced several blackouts over the past years. In particular, there have been five major blackouts over the past forty years, three of which have occurred in the past nine years alone. The aspiration to secure power, to achieve energy efficiency and to contribute to environment protection through the increasing utilization of renewable energies are driving the need to deploy smart grids. It is predicated that these smart grids will allow for bidirectional power flow as well as new ways to manage both power generation and the increasing energy demand. The successful deployment of smart grids is predicated on the ability to guarantee their security. Such a requirement is of paramount importance since electrical grids are essential to several components of the critical infrastructure. Recent cyber security incidents and security research studies demonstrate that electrical grids could be subjected to disrupting attacks that might lead to severe security and economic consequences, and even to the endangerment and loss of human lives. Furthermore, the increasing integration of ICT technologies will definitely augment cyber attack surfaces. The exploitation of these vulnerabilities might lead to attacks that will, for instance, skew the state information, alter the abilities to locate events or faults on transmission lines, place the grid at operating points that are at greater risk from contingencies. This will lead to undesirable and severe consequences such as financial losses, systemic losses from cascading failures, major blackouts, etc. The primary intent of this research is to explore the security of smart grid domains, components, devices and protocols to: (1) elicit the security requirements; (2) identify the attack surfaces together with the underlying vulnerabilities, threats and their cyber physical consequences; (3) propose practical and efficient detection, prevention, mitigation and recovery techniques and methodologies that will definitely harden and enhance the overall smart grid security.