Simulation of Man in the Middle Attack On Smart Grid Testbed

Zero conf protocols date from 1999. They provide plug and play mechanisms to set up networks without having to conFigure DNS or DHCP servers. Almost every device (PCs, printers, scanners, etc.) nowadays “speaks” one of these protocols, sometimes without its owner being even aware of it. The booming IoT ecosystem, in particular, relies heavily on them. Unfortunately, these protocols offer a number of different ways to run, so called, man in the middle attacks (MITM). Some previous publications have mentioned and have taken advantage of one or another of these design flaws. In this paper, we provide a deep dive into the various issues at hand and show the extent of the problem. We consider that the growing reliance of networks on these protocols represent an underestimated and ill covered threat. We have run a number of experiments (300) to test various implementations and discuss our results. We also propose means to detect these attacks thanks to Zeek (aka Bro). We make the attack code as well as the Zeek scripts available to the research community in a format that makes replication of our results possible by researchers while not easy to use by script kiddies.

Cyber security of distribution power systems is of an increasing and pressing importance due to the fast modernisation of current systems. Cyber attacks on distribution power systems may aim to operate the system inefficiently, steal private smart meter data or cause intentional false tripping of few or all feeders. In this paper, a Man in The Middle (MiTM) attack on a power factor correction unit is implemented and demonstrated to overload a distribution feeder and cause an intentional false tripping of the entire feeder causing regional blackout. Experimental implementation of the attack is carried out in a laboratory-scale setup using commercial power equipment under different loading conditions to demonstrate the effectiveness of this attack.

In this paper, the modeling of a Phasor Measurement based Wide Area Monitoring and Control System was developed and presented. The proposed system emphasizes the need for monitoring and control of transmission lines connected to Distributed Energy Resources. In this work, the modeling for a complete scenario of a Discrete Fourier Transform based Synchronized Phasor Measurement Unit is presented. The performance of the developed Phasor Measurement Unit was evaluated by computing Total Vector Error and validated in accordance with IEEE C37.118.1 standard for synchrophasor measurements. The proposed system was simulated using MATLAB/Simulink environment and it is tested under two possible cases; normal operation and fault state. It was verified that the power system status can be easily monitored and controlled in real time by using the measured bus data. This improves the overall system reliability and avoids cascaded blackout during fault occurrence. For smart grid applications the simulation results confirm the validity of the proposed Phasor Measurement based Wide Area Monitoring System.

Wide Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) of power grids is one application of emerging smart grid technologies. A key feature of smart grids is the use of two-way digital communication between Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), and system operators and controllers. The performance and security of the communications network is critical in this application. This work developed an emulation of a communication network as a component of a smart grid test-bed. The test-bed consists of a physical emulation of a power system, a number of IEDs, a Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) and user interface for data acquisition and control connected via a local area network. Network emulation was integrated using Riverbed Modeler, a communications network emulator, utilizing the software's SITL (System-in-the-Loop) capability to interface the IEDs and physical hardware with the network emulation using real-simulation gateways. The emulation enables modeling of various networks and the analysis of operation of the communications network for WAMC applications. This paper presents a methodology of network emulation for this application and analyzes the performance of the emulation as a communications network for smart grid test-beds.

The electrical power system is becoming more and more complex with the increasing demand of the electricity across the world, as the world is becoming the global village. The electrical power system must be reliable and safe enough to fulfil the energy requirements with the continuous supply of energy. The chances of power system's blackouts and outages are increasing with its increased complexity. So, there is a need of an efficient control system to make the power system more safe, efficient and reliable. Wide Area Monitoring, Protection and Control system (WAMPAC) is becoming an emerging technology for an efficient monitoring, protection and control of power system. Phasor measurement unit (PMU) is an integrated part of wide area monitoring, protection and control (WAMPAC) system, which can be used for monitoring, protection and control of complex electrical power systems. PMU gives the synchronized phasor measurements of voltage and current and can easily monitor and control even small disturbances in power system to protect the power system from any blackouts and outages before any fault occurs. In the proposed paper a PMU model is designed in MATLAB/Simulink and then PMU is used for power system protection and the comparative analysis are done with the conventional protection technique for an interconnected two-area network power system.

The Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are emerging networks that provide essential services to drivers on the road. To exchange data, vehicles as network nodes route information between source and destination using the V-to-V infrastructure. To retrieve the best path, routing algorithms are used. We focus in this paper on the Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing algorithm, which is able to retrieve at least three paths. Despite, its efficiency for VANET, the AOMDV protocol still faces big challenges in terms of security. Because of the lack of security mechanisms, such as cryptography and intrusion detection, the AOMDV protocol is vulnerable to attacks such as the blackhole and the man in the middle attacks. For this purpose, we propose in this work a secure and efficient AOMDV routing protocol for vehicular communications. The security consists of detecting malicious vehicles that are not authenticated and have malicious behavior. Moreover, to guarantee integrity and authentication of Route REPlay packets that are used to retrieve the best and secure paths. The efficiency consists of node disjuncture for RREP packets. Our algorithm is specific to vehicular networks, because it deploys specific vehicle-based authentication. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using the NS2 and compared to AOMDV and then to SAODV and TS-AOMDV. The results prove that our algorithm is more secure and efficient than AOMDV, especially in terms of average end-to-end delay, for high-speed vehicles. The delay reduction is estimated to 1.5 ms for a speed of 108 km/h, which is promising for vehicular communications.

Wide Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) of power grids is one application from emerging smart grid technologies. WAMC systems require distributed measurement and control devices, for example Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), a centralized control center(s), WAMC application(s), and two-way digital communication between IEDs, system operators and controllers. Both the performance and security of this system is critical for WAMC applications. A smart grid testbed for the study and development of WAMC systems has been developed. The test-bed consists of a physical emulation of a power system, ten IEDs with integrated Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), a Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) and user interface for data acquisition and control connected via a local area network. Additionally, emulation of more complex communication networks is achieved using SITL (System-in-the-Loop) communication network simulations to interface the IEDs and other physical hardware. The testbed has the capability of testing and analyzing the performance and the security, both physical and cyber, of WAMC applications. This paper presents an overview of the testbed and discusses the methodology of each system component: power system emulation, communication hardware/emulation, and measurement and control system. Some preliminary results are presented which showcase operation of the testbed.

Synchrophasor technology contributes significantly to the power system transformation into smart grid since it enables the wide area monitoring and control concept. At the same time, its integration to the smart grid imposes new cyber security challenges in these cyber-physical systems. The key element of the synchrophasor technology is the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) which provides synchronized measurements to the control center with a fast reporting rate. The PMU measurements are kept in a Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) which collects and time aligns measurements from different PMUs. The communication between PMUs and PDC is defined by the synchrophasor communication standard, C37.118.2-2011, which lacks security mechanisms and hence it is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Consequently, an intrusion detection system (IDS) that can detect PMU measurement manipulation is necessary to maintain the integrity and reliability of the PMU measurements. In this paper, a Synchrophasor Specific Intrusion Detection System that utilizes a PMU's behavioral model to detect data manipulation attacks against PMU measurements is proposed. The proposed IDS approach is tested and validated using a hardware in the loop setup for power systems considering an actual PMU.

Introduction of Synchronized phasor measurement unit (PMU) in power system is a solution for monitoring system wide disturbances. PMUs provide precise information about a system’s phasors such as magnitude and phase angle of sine waves of the system. PMU data is a valuable source when determining the post-mortem of a fault, or a system disturbance. It can be unveiled what time the system began to falter and exactly what instabilities the system experienced. Knowing the cause of such instabilities will allow enhancement of the current system protection system. This will help in minimizing risk, disruptions or total system collapse. PMUs are synchronized via global positioning system (GPS). For wide area monitoring (WAM), synchronization of the PMUs allows for interconnected systems to be monitored simultaneously, giving real time records. This paper explores the impact of PMU in modern power system, deployment strategies of PMU network around Texas Tech University, importance of PMU data collected from the network, correlation of events by data analysis and focus on how the time stamped information is valuable for grid stability. The ongoing smart architecture of grid will increase dependency and importance on PMU based network in future.

Nowadays, power systems face more challenging network wide issues with regard to ensuring secure and reliable operation. Therefore, having a wide area monitoring system is a vital need in order to detect problems and react on them as quickly as possible. An important component when providing wide area monitoring and control for transmission networks is the SCADA system, which connects the substations to the control center by polling data from Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). However, due to data rate limitations, the monitoring is relatively static and therefore infrequent. By using Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) data can be provided in higher rates and with higher accuracy. Since different manufacturers exist in the market, standardization is the key for advancement of the connectivity and interoperability within the system. In the past, utilities used to employ proprietary protocols, which were specified by the product vendors. Gradually, it was decided to move towards open standards to provide an interoperable environment and improve modelling capabilities. Apart from PMU standards, in a typical power system several communication protocols exist and are required for transferring data and each of them covering certain domains and specific groups of data. The objective of this paper is to investigate the adoption, development and performance of the most common open standards to enable interoperable wide area monitoring systems.

Identification of optimal locations to deploy the phasor measurement units (PMUs) is a preliminary task in wide area monitoring and control of power systems. Given the cost and other associated restrictions, it is highly unlikely for any utility to install all the required number of PMUs to ensure the complete observability of the network. This necessitates judicious identification of locations in the network to deploy the PMUs. Ideally, the choice of location must depend on the intended purpose. In this paper, an approach for placement of PMUs considering both the stability and topological aspects is presented. First, a probabilistic framework based on proximity to instability is proposed to rank the generators/load buses in the order of vulnerability. Subsequently, a binary integer linear programming formulation is proposed to identify the optimal locations considering both stability and topological aspects. The optimal locations obtained using the proposed approach ensures a priori observability of most vulnerable buses in addition to enhancing the network observability. Results on IEEE 39-bus system and 246-bus equivalent system of Indian southern grid are presented to illustrate the proposed approach.

ABSTRAK Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengevaluasi tingkat keamanan jaringan WLAN yang telah diterapkan di SMK Kristen Getsemani Manado dengan menggunakan metode Penetration Testing. Dalam Analisa keamanan jaringan WLAN dilakukan dengan menggunakan metode Penetration Testing dengan mensimulasikan bentuk serangan terhadap jaringan menggunakan sistem operasi yang biasa digunakan dalam penetration yaitu Kali Linux. Berdasarkan hasil pengujian ditemukan bahwa jaringan WLAN di SMK Kristen Getsemani Manado masih memiliki kerentanan yang dapat dimanfaatkan oleh pihak yang tidak bertanggung jawab.Dua jenis serangan yang berhasil dilakukan dalam penelitian ini adalah Analisis Lalu lintas Jaringan(Traffic Network) dan Man In The Middle Attack. Dari temuan tersebut disimpulkan bahwa Jaringan WLAN di SMK Kristen Getsemani Manado belum memberikan perilndungan yang optimal bagi pengguna yang terhubung, sehingga masih memungkinkan terjadinya gangguan saat mengakses layanan internet. ABSTRACT This study aims to broadcast the level of WLAN network security that has been implemented at SMK Kristen Getsemani Manado using the Penetration Testing method. In the WLAN network security analysis is carried out using the Penetration Testing method with a copy of the form of attack on the network using the operating system commonly used in penetration, namely Kali Linux. Based on the test results, it was found that the WLAN network at SMK Kristen Getsemani Manado still has vulnerabilities that can be exploited by irresponsible parties. Two types of attacks that were successfully carried out in this study were Network Traffic Analysis and Man In The Middle Attack. From these findings, it is concluded that the WLAN Network at SMK Kristen Getsemani Manado has not provided optimal protection for connected users, so it is still possible for disruptions to occur when accessing internet services.

The open stack communication protocol of the internet of things always in security threats. The vulnerability of protocol faces a problem of man in middle attacks and loss of integrity of communication. Cryptography plays a vital role in security authentication on IoT based enable communication system. IoT devices' limited resource constraints cannot offer any security mechanism on the physical level and network level. The key generation methods uplift the security provision in IoT enables communication model. The process of key generation applied three types of cryptography algorithm, symmetric, asymmetric and hybrid algorithm. The complexity of key generation methods needs more computational time and memory; this is the limitation of IoT devices. So various authors proposed a lightweight key generation algorithm for security and authentication. This paper analyzed the performance of key generation methods based on different cryptography approaches and measured their security strength. For the analysis process, use MATLAB software and sample text data file for the communication of two parties. Some ADHOC methods apply to measure protocol weakness during the communication network compromised with a man in the middle attack. The variable key size also reflects the security strength of IoTs enable devices.

Optimal phasor measurement unit placement for power system observability using teaching–learning based optimization

Applied in WAMS, phasor measurement units (PMU) have proved their effectiveness in increasing distributed power systems reliability. In recent years, devices performing synchrophasor measurements have found application in various systems serving to increase reliability and efficiency of power systems, e.g. by means of improving the quality of system state estimation [1]–[4]. Wide Area Control Systems (WACS), Wide Area Protection Systems (WAPS), Wide Area Monitoring, Protection And Control Systems (WAMP ACS) are some promising fields of application for this class of devices.