The increasing penetration of cyber systems into smart grids has resulted in these grids being more vulnerable to cyber physical attacks. The central challenge of higher order
cyber-physical contingency analysis is the exponential blow-up of the attack surface due to a large number of attack vectors. This gives rise to computational challenges in devising efficient attack mitigation strategies. However, a system operator can leverage private information about the underlying network to maintain a strategic advantage over an adversary equipped with superior computational capability and situational awareness. In this work, we examine the following scenario: A malicious entity intrudes the cyber-layer of a power network and trips the transmission lines. The objective of the system operator is to deploy security measures in the cyber-layer to minimize the impact of such attacks. Due to budget constraints, the attacker and the system operator have limits on the maximum number of transmission lines they can attack or defend. We model this adversarial interaction as a resource-constrained attacker-defender game. The computational intractability of solving large security games is well known. However, we exploit the approximately modular behavior of an impact metric known as the disturbance value to arrive at a linear-time algorithm for computing an optimal defense strategy. We validate the efficacy of the proposed strategy against attackers of various capabilities and provide an algorithm for a real-time implementation.
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Combined cyber and physical attacks on the maritime transportation system
For years, there has been discussion about physical security in the maritime transportation system (MTS). That discussion has led to standards, regulations, etc. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in cyber security in the MTS that has led to discussions about best practices for cyber security. It is likely that many future attacks on the MTS (and other systems) will be multi-modal, including both a cyber and a physical component. As a simple example, hacking into security cameras at a port increases vulnerability to a physical intrusion. Thus, a cyber attack could be a precursor to a physical attack, and in fact the opposite could also be the case. This paper presents scenarios of combined cyber and physical attacks and describes ways to understand their likelihood based on ease of attack and seriousness of potential consequences.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737857
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10166239
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- NMIOTC Maritime interdiction operations journal
- Volume:
- 18
- ISSN:
- 2241-4371
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 27-37
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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