Detecting Cyber Attacks in Smart-Grid Networks with Probability Distribution Comparison

Smart-grids add ICT to grid infrastructure and hence vulnerable to security threats. In this paper, we propose flooding and bruteforce attack detection method against smart-grid infrastructure. This we achieve by modeling the Modbus communication messages as a probability distribution and subsequently, we compare a test interval with the base distribution using the Hellinger distance metric. We experiment with two publicly available datasets to show that the proposed method can detect these attacks effectively.