CPS: Breakthrough: Collaborative Research: Securing Smart Grid by Understanding

智能电网包括两个相互依存的基础设施：输配电网络和与之配套的电信网络。这些基础设施之间的复杂交互导致了攻击和故障传播的新途径，而这些途径目前还没有得到很好的理解。这个创新项目采用了一种全面的多层次方法来理解和描述这两个基础设施之间的相互依赖关系，并设计出增强其稳健性的机制。具体来说，该项目有四个目标。第一个目标是深入了解标准化的智能电网通信协议，并研究强化它们的机制。这是必要的，因为目前的协议是出了名的容易攻击。第二个目标是确保状态估计技术的鲁棒性，因为它们构成了智能电网分析的基础。特别是，该项目应利用基于隐写术的方法来检测不良数据和受损设备。第三个目标是探索基于信任的攻击检测策略，该策略将安全状态估计与潮流模型和软件认证相结合，以检测和隔离受损组件。最终目标是研究结合轻量级预测模型、随机决策过程、故意孤岛和博弈论技术的重构策略，以减轻故障的蔓延和负荷的损失。本项目将研究的智能电网安全的一个独特方面是及时性的关键重要性，因此在机制的有效性和引入的开销之间进行权衡。该项目预计将提供实用技术，使智能电网更强大，抵御故障和攻击，并使其能够从大规模故障中恢复，减少容量损失。该项目还将培训学生在电力系统运行和设计、网络协议和网络物理安全等多学科领域。

Smart grid includes two interdependent infrastructures: power transmission and distribution network, and the supporting telecommunications network. Complex interactions among these infrastructures lead to new pathways for attack and failure propagation that are currently not well understood. This innovative project takes a holistic multilevel approach to understand and characterize the interdependencies between these two infrastructures, and devise mechanisms to enhance their robustness. Specifically, the project has four goals. The first goal is to understand the standardized smart grid communications protocols in depth and examine mechanisms to harden them. This is essential since the current protocols are notoriously easy to attack. The second goal is to ensure robustness in state estimation techniques since they form the basis for much of the analysis of smart grid. In particular, the project shall exploit a steganography-based approach to detect bad data and compromised devices. The third goal is to explore trust-based attack detection strategies that combine the secure state estimation with power flow models and software attestation to detect and isolate compromised components. The final goal is to study reconfiguration strategies that combine light-weight prediction models, stochastic decision processes, intentional islanding, and game theory techniques to mitigate the spreading of failures and the loss of load. A unique aspect of smart grid security that will be studied in this project is the critical importance of timeliness, and thus a tradeoff between effectiveness of the mechanisms and the overhead introduced. The project is expected to provide practical techniques for making the smart grid more robust against failures and attacks, and enable it to recover from large scale failures with less loss of capacity. The project will also train students in the multidisciplinary areas of power systems operation and design, networking protocols, and cyber-physical security.