CPS Testbed Architectures for WAMPAC using Industrial Substation and Control Center Platforms and Attack-Defense Evaluation

Advanced persistent threats and cyberattacks can impact wide-area monitoring, protection, and control (WAMPAC) system operation. Many cyber-physical system (CPS) testbeds have been developed for attack-defense experimentation and attack-resiliency tools evaluation for WAMPAC, but they are limited to a simulation-and-emulation based environment. This paper presents a quasi-realistic CPS attack-defense testbed-based framework for WAMPAC applications using the industrial substation and control center platforms such as eTerra integrated with the hardware-in-the-loop CPS smart grid testbed available at Iowa State University. The proposed framework includes various combinations of industry-grade substation and control center platforms, communication topologies, realtime digital simulators, and a novel cyber-physical distributed intrusion-and-anomaly detection system (D-IADS) for WAMPAC applications. The D-IADS includes a master at the control center and geographically distributed sensor devices at each substation. Each D-IADS sensor deployed at a substation or control center network monitors ingress and egress traffic, detect intrusions, and dispatch alerts to the D-IADS master. The D-IADS master centrally monitors and analyze the alerts and controls D-IADS sensors. We considered an EMP60 synthetic CPS grid as a case study to demonstrate the framework and proposed D-IADS for WAMPAC applications against cyberattack vectors such as Man-in-the-Middle DNP3 attack, denial-of-service, and data-integrity attacks.