Challenges and Opportunities: Cyber Physical Security in the Smart Grid
In this chapter, we develop a vision to address challenges in securing the smart grid. Despite recent innovations, grid security remains a critical issue. The infrastructure is highly vulnerable due to its large scale, connectivity, and heterogeneity. Moreover, attacks on cyber physical systems and the grid have been realized, most notably the attack on the Ukraine power system in 2015. While techniques in cyber security are useful, their implementation is not sufficient to secure the smart grid. Consequently, we advocate for research in cyber physical system security, an interdisciplinary field which combines tools from both cyber security and system theory. Within this field, we argue that engineers need to develop a framework of accountability comprised of three main research thrusts: (1) the detection of attacks, (2) the attribution of attacks to particular malicious components and devices on the grid, and (3) the resilient design of systems and algorithms to ensure acceptable performance in the presence of malicious behavior. To close, we discuss the need for a unifying language and set of tools to address these problems, as we consider additional research in compositional security.