A Holistic Approach - How to Achieve the State-of-art in Cybersecurity for a Secondary Distribution Automation Energy System Applying the IEC 62443 Standard

Recent events have shown that critical infrastructure systems such as Secondary Distribution Automation (SDA) networks are in focus on the world scene because it has suffered constant cyber-attacks. This high exposure to cybernetic risks is due to the fact that these systems have a relatively low level of protection maturity. Concern about protecting these systems against attacker actions has been growing as the impacts of such intrusions have serious financial consequences, threaten the loss of intellectual property and generally harm the company's image on the market. In order to address the cybersecurity issue of these critical systems from a holistic point of view, the analysis should be based on an international standard addressing the subject in question: IEC 62443. This standard represents an international agreement on best security practices for Industrial Automation Control Systems (IACS). IEC 62443 takes a broad approach and addresses multiple defense concepts by applying a mechanism known as defense in depth, whose purpose is to stop the attacker's action through multiple layers of protection, defining security levels for each layer. The focus of this work is to apply the IEC 62443 Standard in a standard SDA energy system to test the application of the standard, particularly chapter 3-3, in order to achieve acceptable levels of security in the installations.