Identifying vulnerabilities in smart gric communication networks of electrical substations using GEESE 2.0

The use of Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) in electrical substations has brought a great improvement in terms of speed, costs, maintenance, and reliability. In this context, the use of IEC 61850 standard appears as one of the main recommendations for substation automation in smart grids that digitally perform the electrical network control and protection. Nevertheless, this improvement may be prone to a number of security issues. Therefore, security threats in substation networks must be detected in order to improve cyber security solutions. GEESE is a command-line packet generator software following the IEC 61850 standard. In this work, we propose GEESE 2.0, an extension to GEESE that provides a graphical user interface that easily allows substation cyber security threat evaluation. Moreover, GEESE 2.0 can sniff, capture, modify and send GOOSE packets on the network, so that it can create different attacks in order to evaluate the substation security. We have locally deployed a substation network emulation and used GEESE 2.0 to perform network attacks in order to analyze the impact of an attack in a substation protection scheme.