Publications

Final report : impacts analysis for cyber attack on electric power systems (national SCADA test bed FY09)

Stamp, Jason E.; Laviolette, Randall A.

The development continues for Finite State Abstraction (FSA) methods to enable Impacts Analysis (IA) for cyber attack against power grid control systems. Building upon previous work, we successfully demonstrated the addition of Bounded Model Checking (BMC) to the FSA method, which constrains grid conditions to reasonable behavior. The new FSA feature was successfully implemented and tested. FSA is an important part of IA for the power grid, complementing steady-state approaches. It enables the simultaneous evaluation of myriad dynamic trajectories for the system, which in turn facilitates IA for whole ranges of system conditions simultaneously. Given the potentially wide range and subtle nature of potential control system attacks, this is a promising research approach. In this report, we will explain the addition of BMC to the previous FSA work and some testing/simulation upon the implemented code using a two-bus test system. The current FSA approach and code allow the calculation of the acceptability of power grid conditions post-cyber attack (over a given time horizon and for a specific grid topology). Future work will enable analysis spanning various topologies (to account for switching events), as well as an understanding of the cyber attack stimuli that can lead to undesirable grid conditions.