Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructures: Attack and Defense Modeling

The modern world can be described as a complex network of physical and cyber-based systems, on which many aspects of society depend on. Recent government reports have found that cyber-based attacks targeting critical infrastructure systems have grown in both numbers and sophistication. Due to the growing interdependencies between computers, communication and power infrastructures, the disruption of electric power operations can have catastrophic consequences on national security, as well as the economy. In response, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has established a cybersecurity standard utilities are mandated to follow. This standard identifies the most common cyber-related vulnerabilities that exist in control systems, namely system-, scenario-, and leaf- level vulnerabilities, and offers recommendations to address these weaknesses. The recommendations include real-time monitoring, anomaly detection ,impact analysis, and mitigation strategies.

In this paper, critical infrastructures, specifically power infrastructures are surveyed in order to evaluate their security strength. The three types of malicious attacks on this system that are explored are attacks upon the system, attacks by the system, and attacks through the system. These issues span physical security, such as unmanned substations, electrical security, such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that can be widely found in the industry, and cyber security, which includes the major control systems (process control system, distributed control system, and energy management system).