RiskISM: A Risk Assessment Tool for Substations

Securing substations is crucial in ensuring unimpeded operations within the Smart Grid. Accordingly, one such measure that is taken to ensure a substation’s security is risk assessment. Identifying the most critical devices within the substation is crucial in mitigating the substation’s operational downtime during an attack. Also, it is possible to use the outcome of risk assessment as input to trust models. Most risk assessment tools require extensive profiling of the substation and its components as well as being modified to suit a substation under study. In this paper, we present RiskISM, a risk assessment tool for substations that implements certain stages of Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). It profiles, from the substation architecture, each substation device’s unique identification, device classification, device type and functional influence to determine its criticality level. The tool’s output is the criticality-based colour-coding of each device and the visualization of the extent of functional influence each device has within the substation. It is this functional influence that determines the extent to which an attack on the device cascades when it is compromised. We believe utility providers can use the tool’s output as input to progressively implement defence mechanisms. We also believe that the output of this tool can be used as input to trust models and we have reserved this for future work.