A Method for Cyber Attack Threat Assessment of Electric Power Supervision and Control System Considering Its Vulnerability

Nowadays frequent cases of cyber attacks on industrial control systems, including the supervision and control of power system, have occurred around the world. Large amount of work, related with cyber security protection of power system, has been carried out, in accordance with the principle of security partition, dedicated network, network isolation and authentication. However, consideration of the system vulnerability is often lacked in threat assessment methods commonly used. This paper proposes a method to assess cyber attack threat of the supervision and control system of power system, considering its vulnerability. To be specific, typical scenarios of cyber attack are built and the corresponding threat means are identified firstly. Then, the related security protection areas are sorted out, from which the vulnerability assessment values of the system can be got. And then the threat-vulnerability correlation values are determined in consideration of the vulnerability. Based on threat-vulnerability correlation values, the threat assessment of attack scenarios is obtained. Finally, in view of overall scenarios, quantitative evaluation of cyber attack threat in substations, power plants, etc, is realized. A typical substation is analyzed as test case, to verify the effectiveness of this method.