Overview

The second SPARKS stakeholder workshop took place on Wednesday 25th March, 2015 in Cork, Ireland, and was located across two sites: the premises of EMC Corporation and at the Nimbus microgrid. The workshop had a strong focus on demonstrating the cybersecurity challenge for smart grid, and included a live demonstration of a cyber-attack. The project highlighted its response to the cybersecurity smart grid threat. Additionally, there were presentations from other EU-funded projects, namely the SEGRID and HyRiM projects.

The programme for the workshop included the following highlights:

• An overview of the smart grid cybersecurity threat landscape, touching on recent cyber-attacks that were targeted at the energy sector
• A demonstration of a real cyber-attack to Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), including an insight into the economic implications of such attacks when leading to large scale power outages
• An introduction to security and risk analysis approaches that can be used to understand the risks from such threats to a smart grid
• Presentations on a number of key smart grid security technologies that can be used to detect and mitigate cyber-attacks to a smart grid
• A visit to the state-of-the-art Nimbus microgrid site, including insights into how advanced security analytics techniques can be used to identify potentially malicious attacks to such an infrastructure
• Presentations from key related European projects that are investigating smart grid security and assessing risks to complex interconnected critical infrastructures

A Multi-stage Cyber-attack Demonstration

At the stakeholder workshop, a multi-stage cyber-attack demonstration was presented to the stakeholders. The aim of this demonstration was to highlight the nature of the cybersecurity problem for the smart grid. The attack demonstration implemented a number of steps, such as a social engineering attack, and exploited known software vulnerabilities to realise a man-in-the-middle attack between a IEC 61850 client and a photovoltaic inverter located at the AIT smartEST lab in Vienna, Austria.

Workshop Programme

The following presentations were given at the workshop; click on the links to download a PDF version of the slides:

• An Introduction to the SPARKS Project
  Dr Paul Smith, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
• Resilient Smart Grids
  Dr André Teixeira, Kaveh Paridari and Henrik Sandberg, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
• A Man-in-the-middle Attack to IEC 61850-controlled Photovoltaics*
  Dr Kieran McLaughlin and BooJoong Kang, Queen’s University Belfast; Silvio La Porta, EMC; Friederich Kupzog and Thomas Strasser, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
  
• SCADA Intrusion Detection Systems
  Dr Kieran McLaughlin, Queen’s University Belfast
• Tools and Metrics for Vulnerability Assessment
  Prof Henrik Sandberg, Kaveh Paridari and André Teixeira, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
• Analysing the Financial Impact of Smart Grid Cyber-Attacks
  Dr Michael Schmidthaler and Johannes Reichl, Energy Institute, Linz
• Data Analytics for a Secure Smart Grid
  Dr Silvio La Porta, EMC
• Modelling the Impact of Attacks to Microgrid Systems
  Dr Rohan Chabukswar, UTRC
• The Hybrid Risk Management for Utility Provider (HyRiM) Project
  Dr Paul Smith and Stefan Schauer, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
• The Security for Smart Electricity GRIDS (SEGRID) Project
  Dr Frank Fransen, TNO

* For security reasons, we have not made this presentation publicly available. If you are interested in discussing this demonstration, please contact the coordinator.