IEC 61850 Compatible OpenPLC for Cyber Attack Case Studies on Smart Substation Systems

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are essential components for enabling remote monitoring and automated control in industrial control systems. Recently PLCs are often utilized in a modernized power grid system for implementing an additional layer of automated control, such as operation of circuit breakers under specific conditions. Thus, in order to create a software-based smart grid testbed (or ‘cyber range’ for cyber security experiments); emulation of the PLC is imperative. OpenPLC is a software widely used for emulating PLCs, but unfortunately it does not support IEC 61850 standard, which is the globally adopted standard for substation automation in smart power grid systems. Thus, in this paper, the enhancement of OpenPLC to support IEC 61850 protocol and information models is discussed. The performance of the implementation has been validated to corroborate its application for use cases in the smart grid paradigm. Subsequently, the implementation is demonstrated in a smart grid cyber range to evaluate the impacts of attacks and thereby, the effectiveness of security measures and robustness of PLC control logic. The implementation, named ‘OpenPLC61850’, is made available as an open-source project for the wider research and industry community.