Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI) Student Seminar

Cybersecurity in the Power Grid - An ns3 and RTDS perspective 

Traditionally, dedicated channels and proprietary protocols have been utilized to facilitate grid communications. Today, with deregulations in energy markets and the proliferation of independent power entities, communication links are being established through the public internet via open protocols - mainly to allow for scalability. In these instances, information security is only as strong as the weakest link. Additionally, threats stemming from known cyber vulnerabilities, insider attacks, and inherent weaknesses of communication medium can be exploited by adversaries to cause widespread system interruptions and outages. In order to practically model the impacts of cyber-security events in such complex settings, it is necessary to realistically combine grid interactions with the artefacts introduced by the cyber layer. For this, a state-of-the-art cyber-physical testbed is being developed in the RISE lab at York University which is composed of ns3 and real-time digital simulator (RTDS). This testbed is currently being utilized to reproduce natural and adversarial cyber-physical events in the transmission, distribution and microgrid levels. Comprehensive labelled datasets are being synthesized from these experiments. Details of this framework were presented in this talk. 

Cybersecurity Challenges and Strategies in a Data-driven Power Grid 

With the proliferation of active power entities and grid sensors, the modern electric grid is transforming into an information-rich and adaptive infrastructure. While these data and actuation capabilities can be leveraged to run the grid more efficiently - these can also be exploited and perturbed to perpetrate cascading outages in the power grid. In this talk, stealthy cyber-attacks targeting transmission,  distribution and microgrid levels will be presented. The physical impacts of these attacks on grid states were highlighted. Then, mitigation strategies that can offset these impacts were presented. Furthermore, challenges associated with training data-driven models for the power grid were discussed along with how these can be exploited to glean important insights into power grid operations, make erroneous decisions and stealthily alter inferencing. 

The Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI) along with the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE) organized the CPI Student Seminar, on April 24^th, 2024, featuring Prof. Pirathayini Srikantha, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University.  

Lunch was provided for registrants. 

Prof. Pirathayini Srikantha presented two talks on the day: 

1. New Skills Talk: Cybersecurity in the Power Grid - An ns3 and RTDS perspective. 
2. Research Talk: Cyber-security Challenges and Strategies in a Data-driven Power Grid

Prof. Pirathayini Srikantha is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University. She is the founder and director of the RISE (Resilient Intelligent Sustainable Energy) lab. She holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in the area of Reliable and Secure Power Grid Systems. She was previously a faculty member at Western University from 2017 to 2019. She received her B.A.Sc. degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2009 and her M.A.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the same institute in 2013. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2017. She is a certified Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in Ontario. She is the recipient of the 2022 Ontario Professional Engineers Association - Engineering Medal for Young Engineers. She is currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. Her work has been published in premier smart grid journal and conference venues. Her research efforts have received recognitions that include the best paper award (IEEE Smart Grid Communications) and runner-up best poster award (ACM Women in Computing).