Impediments to survivability of the electric power grid and some collaborative EE-CS research issues to solve them (original) (raw)
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2001
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Information systems now form the backbone of nearly every government and private system-from targeting weapons to conducting financial transactions. Increasingly these systems are networked together allowing for distributed operations, sharing of databases, and redundant capability. Ensuring these networks are secure, robust, and reliable is critical for the strategic and economic well being of the Nation. The blackout of August 14, 2003 affected 8 states and fifty million people and could cost up to $5 billion 2. The DOE/NERC interim reports 3 indicate the outage progressed as a chain of relatively minor events consistent with previous cascading outages caused by a domino reaction 4. The increasing use of embedded distributed systems to manage and control our technologically complex society makes knowing the vulnerability of such systems essential to improving their intrinsic reliability/survivability. Our discussion employs the power transmission grid.
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The increasing interconnectedness of critical infrastructures with digital systems has introduced new vulnerabilities and potential aconsequences of cyber-attacks. This paper aims to investigate the vulnerabilities and potential consequences of cyber-attacks on critical infrastructures such as power grids and transportation systems. Additionally, it proposes robust security measures to safeguard against these threats. By exploring the intersection of cybersecurity and critical infrastructures, this paper seeks to contribute to the advancement of science and technology in protecting society's most essential services.
Addressing vulnerability to cascading failure against intelligent adversaries in power networks
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The blackout of August 14, 2003, showed that electric power grids are vulnerable to cascading failure. Since then, numerous methods of vulnerability analysis have been developed to help the owners and operators of power networks and other infrastructure systems protect them against possible catastrophic events (including attacks by intelligent adversaries). With cascading failures, even small attacks can have a large impact. Cascading failures have historically been considered a major unsolved problem for complex networks such as electricity systems, but recent developments in probabilistic analysis of cascading failure are making it possible to take cascading failures into account in methods of vulnerability assessment. In particular, our game-theoretic model can be used to analyze how an intelligent adversary might seek to take advantage of a network's vulnerability to cascading failure. Specifically, our model provides a tool to simulate power flows within the network, and analyze how attackers can use their knowledge of cascading failure. Our model can also be used to compare the effectiveness of different types of investments to make systems more resilient, including both hardening components and also making the system less vulnerable to cascading failure (e.g., by increasing the capacities of transmission lines, or adding new lines).
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