Smart Water Distribution System Communication Architecture Risk Analysis Using Formal Methods

Water is one of the most important resources nowadays, which is why a good management can bring multiple benefits in modern society. With the continuous increase of water consumption, there is significant research regarding the efficiency of water control and monitoring process, in order to make optimal decisions for the proper functioning of a healthy eco-system. In the current paper we present a system that uses a water distribution network to evaluate the integration of modern concepts in a smart, secure and distributed approach for consumer demand monitoring. An IoT architecture is used for collecting data from smart meters, with push-based data exchange and reactive programming patterns. The network is integrated with a blockchain solution developed using Hyperledger Fabric to ensure an additional layer of security and transparency, while being used as an audit tool as well as data provider for decision support systems.

Three-dimensional convolutional neural network for leak detection and localization in smart water distribution systems

The “Smart Water Grid” integrates the internet of things, information, and communications technologies for efficient, sustainable water management, using sensors and controls to tackle issues like leaks and overuse. Patent analysis aids this technology monitoring, revealing trends and solutions and enabling innovation to overcome challenges in smart water distribution systems. This study highlights the global distribution of patent filings, and the leading companies and technologies involved in smart water grid innovation. Patent data reveals a focus on communication and control technologies, as well as data transmission and processing (as reflected by the dominant patent classifications) within the smart water grid space, highlighting the importance of communication technologies in this field. In summary, smart water grid innovation is driven by the integration of efficient water management, with a global focus led by the United States and China.

The article presents the current problems of protecting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, current threats to its security and the need to organise proper counteraction under martial law. Threats to critical infrastructure include factors that can actually or potentially harm the stability of its operation, functionality, integrity, resilience or lead to its destruction. The purpose of the article is to create an up-to-date threat model that formalises the likely impacts on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, which will improve the effectiveness of its protection. The scientific novelty of the article is that it examines the actual needs and problematic issues of forming a modern model of threats to critical infrastructure, primarily in the context of the ongoing full-scale military aggression of the russian federation against Ukraine. Creating a threat model is defined for critical infrastructure as a necessity to ensure effective protection of its facilities. The formation of a basic threat model for critical infrastructure facilities, which should include related models of the facility, situation and intruder, is currently an important element of the algorithm for solving this problem. The basic model of threats to critical infrastructure is the framework on which the state determines who and what it needs to protect itself from at the national level. However, Ukrainian legislation currently does not provide for the need to develop a model of threats to the national critical infrastructure, which negatively affects the state of its security and resilience. The perspective measures that will contribute to both the stable functioning of critical infrastructure facilities and ensure their proper protection are outlined: enshrining in Ukrainian legislation the need to develop a model of threats to critical infrastructure, adopting regulations on standardisation of risk management processes for critical infrastructure in order to prevent threats, and more.

System restoration is aimed at ensuring continuity of the electric supply to all loads in a distribution system under abnormal conditions without violating electrical-constraints. This adds the feature of “self-healing” to the distribution system to make it as smart system. This paper presents a literature survey of published research techniques on electric supply restoration over the period 1981–2024. Four categories of distribution systems with different attributes are proposed by the present authors to compare fairly among these techniques through implementation and running the necessary codes for each restoration technique. Comparisons are concerned with contribution, adopted technique, test model, advantages and disadvantages as well as utilization of renewables. To meet the electrical-constraints on electric supply restoration, fifteen challenges are selected, reviewed and discussed within the comparisons. The algorithms based on graph theory showed better performance regarding the challenges related to minimizing the energy-not-supplied, achieving self-healing dream, preventing feeder overloading and maintaining the voltage profile within limits when compared with other algorithms. The algorithms based on linear and nonlinear programming showed better performance concerning the challenges related to minimizing restoration time and preventing in-supply load shedding when compared with other algorithms. The algorithms based on heuristics and metaheuristics showed better performance concerning the challenges related to system configuration, generating optimal sequence of switches, minimizing the number of ordered switches and reducing the restoration cost when compared with other algorithms. The future trends of the supply restoration in smart distribution systems are also discussed. The present survey is concluded with a summary of the findings from the literature survey and outlines potential directions for future research. It highlights the key opportunities to support researchers in advancing more intelligent restoration strategies for electric supply in smart distribution systems.

Modern technologies empower water distribution systems (WDS) for better services in the processes of water supply, storage, distribution, and recycling. They improve real-time monitoring, automating, and managing. However, the limitations of these technologies introduce cyber-physical attacks to the WDS. The main goals of cyber-physical attacks include disrupting normal operations and tampering the critical data, which have negative impacts on the WDS. Therefore, it is vital to develop and implement solutions to increase the security of the WDS by detecting and mitigating cyber-physical attacks. Since security for WDS is relatively new, there are no surveys on this topic despite its vital importance. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey for the common cyber-physical attacks and common detection mechanisms for the WDS. We compare the attacks and detection methods with emphasis on ideas, methods, evaluation results, advantages, limitations, etc. We further provide a future research direction. We realize that there are still not many research attempts in this area and we hope that this work can trigger more research activities related to the WDS.

Emphasis on smart grid and renewable energy generation is changing the way distribution systems are planned and operated. The smart distribution systems of the future and will have intelligent sensors and automated devices at strategic locations to enable two-way communication of real-time data. They will also be able to handle large penetration of customer-owned wind or solar generation, other distributed energy sources, and electric vehicles. These changes will require that the students of future and working professionals are well prepared to work with the new systems. The paper focuses on definitions related to smart distribution systems. This is followed by some strategies to educate students and professionals about smart distribution systems.

Model checking is a powerful formal analytical approach to verifying software and hardware systems. However, general industrial adoption is far from widespread. Some difficulties include the inaccessibility of techniques and tools and the need for further empirical evaluation in industrial contexts. This study considers the use of Simulink Design Verifier, a model checker that forms part of a modelling system already widely used in the safety-critical industry. Model checking is applied to a number of real-world problem reports, associated with aero-engine monitoring functions, to determine whether it can provide a practical route into effective verification, particularly for non-specialists. The study also considers the extent to which model checking can satisfy the requirements of the extensive DO-178C guidance on formal methods. The study shows that the benefits of model checking can be realised in an industrial setting without specialist skills, particularly when it is targeted at parts of the software that are error-prone, difficult to verify conventionally or critical. Importantly, it shows that model checking can find errors earlier in the design cycle than testing, which potentially saves money, due to reduced scrap and rework.

The present study explores contemporary approaches to the analysis, modelling and assurance of cyber security of critical information infrastructure in the face of modern threats. This text focuses on the utilisation of intelligent methods and advanced technologies for the protection of critical information infrastructure (CII). The objective of the present study is to employ an integrative approach to analysing, modelling, and ensuring the cyber security of CII in the face of contemporary threats. The methodological foundation of the study is a comprehensive analysis of scientific literature dedicated to the application of intelligent methods and technologies for the protection of CII. This includes both fundamental theoretical developments and practical aspects of implementing modern cyber security approaches, as well as experimental modelling of fraud detection processes in the CII of the financial sector. This modelling was conducted by the authors using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. A comparative analysis of concepts proposed by modern researchers is given particular emphasis, with the objective of identifying the main trends, development prospects, and potential areas for improving existing CII protection systems. In relation to the outcomes of the extension of scientific sources, it was determined that intelligent methodologies founded on machine learning and AI represent pivotal technologies for the effective safeguarding of critical infrastructure within the financial sector against contemporary cyberattacks and security threats. The results of the modelling of fraud detection processes in the CII of the financial sector of the economy allow an assessment of the effectiveness of the methods used, determination of their advantages and limitations, and formulation of recommendations for further improvement of cyber protection systems for the CII of the financial sector of the economy. The employment of an integrative approach, encompassing threat analysis, simulation modelling, artificial intelligence, and contemporary cyber defence technologies, facilitates the enhancement of the security of critical infrastructure and the effective response to emergent threats. The proposed solutions have the potential to facilitate the development of highly effective cyber defence systems in various critical infrastructure industries, including the financial, energy, and government sectors.

Model checking is a popular formal technique facilitating automatic verification of finite-state transition systems, and it has been applied to almost all of the Web service verification aspects, such as control-flow, data-flow, interaction, time requirements, quality of service, security requirements, etc. However, no systematic literature review focused on model checking of Web services is available. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, we systematically review existing research works on model checking based Web service verification appeared during the period of 2002-2017. We present a verification goal based classification of the collected articles, and for each paper, we identify the verification technique, target Web service standard, flavor of the employed model checking technique and tool, and other supplementary techniques, if any. Further, we highlight some of the issues, gaps, key challenges in this area and propose some future directions.

Secure software engineering has emerged in recent decades by encouraging the idea of software security has to be an integral part of all the phases of the software development lifecycle. As a result, each phase of the lifecycle is associated with security-specific best practices such as threat modeling and static code analysis. It was observed that various artifacts (i.e., security requirements, architectural flaws, bug reports, security test cases) generated as a result of security best practices tend to be segregated. This creates a significant barrier to resolve the security issues at the implementation phase since most of them are originated in the design phase. In order to address this issue, this paper presents a knowledge-modeling based approach to semantically infer the associations between architectural level security flaws and code-level security bugs, which is manually tedious. Threat modeling and static analysis are used to identify security flaws and security bugs, respectively. The case study based experimental results revealed that the architectural level security flaws have a significant impact on originating security bugs in the code level. Besides, the evaluation results confirmed the scalability of the proposed approach to large-scale industrial software products.

Model checking of safety-critical software in the nuclear engineering domain

Since the development of economics and society, secured and reliable power supply has become essential. Model and diagrams management remains the fundamental technology for distribution automation and smart distribution system. However, distribution system develops rapidly, simple model and diagrams management and maintenance with GIS would not satisfy the requirements by system operation. In this paper, we propose panorama dispatching technologies as integrative solution for smart distribution system. Firstly, the framework of panorama dispatching technologies is established; then key technologies for panorama dispatching technologies are introduced. With our proposed methods and technologies, the distribution system operators can not only manage and examine accuracy of model and diagram, but also work on a unique strategic diagram to better understand and dispatch the system with multiple levels and views of panorama diagrams. The results in this paper are very useful for distribution automation and smart distribution system.

Security protocols have been analysed using a variety of tools and focusing on a variety of properties. Most findings assume the ever so popular Dolev-Yao threat model. A more recent threat model called the Rational Attacker [1] sees each protocol participant decide whether or not to conform to the protocol upon their own cost/benefit analysis. Each participant neither colludes nor shares knowledge with anyone, a feature that rules out the applicability of existing equivalence results in the Dolev-Yao model. Aiming at mechanical validation, we abstract away the actual cost/benefit analysis and obtain the General Attacker threat model, which sees each principal blindly act as a Dolev-Yao attacker.The analysis of security protocols under the General Attacker threat model brings forward yet more insights: retaliation attacks and anticipation attacks are our main findings, while the tool support can scale up to the new analysis at a negligible price. The general threat model for security protocols based on set-rewriting that was adopted in AVISPA [2] is leveraged so as to express the General Attacker. The state-of-the-art model checker SATMC [3] is then used to automatically validate a protocol under the new threats, so that retaliation and anticipation attacks can automatically be found.KeywordsModel CheckSecurity ProtocolCryptographic ProtocolThreat ModelGeneral AttackThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

We report on a case study in applying different formal methods to model and verify an architecture for administrating digital signatures. The architecture comprises several concurrently executing systems that authenticate users and generate and store digital signatures by passing security relevant data through a tightly controlled interface. The architecture is interesting from a formal-methods perspective as it involves complex operations on data as well as process coordination and hence is a candidate for both data-oriented and process-oriented formal methods.We have built and verified two models of the signature architecture using two representative formal methods. In the first, we specify a data model of the architecture in Z that we extend to a trace model and interactively verify by theorem proving. In the second, we model the architecture as a system of communicating processes that we verify by finite-state model checking. We provide a detailed comparison of these two different approaches to formalization (infinite state with rich data types versus finite state) and verification (theorem proving versus model checking). Contrary to common belief, our case study suggests that Z is well suited for temporal reasoning about process models with complex operations on data. Moreover, our comparison highlights the advantages of proving theorems about such models and provides evidence that, in the hands of an experienced user, theorem proving may be neither substantially more time-consuming nor more complex than model checking.