Design of a Testbed for Cybersecurity Research on Power Converters in Microgrids

In this paper, we study the design of an Internet-enabled power electronic converter for cybersecurity research in microgrid systems. The motivation for this paper comes from the OpenPLC project [1], and the development of a PLC testbed which can be used for cybersecurity research [2]. Depending on the economics of the problem, having dedicated and protected communication channels may not be economically feasible, especially for microgrid systems. In other words, the economics of the application may dictate the use of common and unprotected communication channels, like the Internet for higher level coordination. This means that the embedded system responsible for time-sensitive tasks, like power management, energy management, voltage regulation, or reactive power sharing, must also have some awareness of potential cyber threats. In particular, its state transition diagram, timeout values for blocking I/O operations, whether it will be bare-metal or not, and where the TCP/IP stack will run, are all very critical design issues. In this work, different design architectures are analyzed, the pros and cons of each option are studied, and a final system architecture is proposed.