Grant: Industrial Research Chairs

The current electric grid is considered as one of the best engineering achievements of the twentieth century. Itwas designed to deliver power to various consumer domains. To a large extent, it has been successful infulfilling this objective. Nevertheless, the electric grid has experienced several blackouts over the past years. Inparticular, there have been five major blackouts over the past forty years, three of which have occurred in thepast nine years alone. The aspiration to secure power, to achieve energy efficiency and to contribute toenvironment protection through the increasing utilization of renewable energies are driving the need to deploysmart grids. It is predicated that these smart grids will allow for bidirectional power flow as well as new waysto manage both power generation and the increasing energy demand. The successful deployment of smart gridsis predicated on the ability to guarantee their security. Such a requirement is of paramount importance sinceelectrical grids are essential to several components of the critical infrastructure. Recent cyber security incidentsand security research studies demonstrate that electrical grids could be subjected to disrupting attacks thatmight lead to severe security and economic consequences, and even to the endangerment and loss of humanlives. Furthermore, the increasing integration of ICT technologies will definitely augment cyber attacksurfaces. The exploitation of these vulnerabilities might lead to attacks that will, for instance, skew the stateinformation, alter the abilities to locate events or faults on transmission lines, place the grid at operating pointsthat are at greater risk from contingencies. This will lead to undesirable and severe consequences such asfinancial losses, systemic losses from cascading failures, major blackouts, etc. The primary intent of thisresearch is to explore the security of smart grid domains, components, devices and protocols to: (1) elicit thesecurity requirements; (2) identify the attack surfaces together with the underlying vulnerabilities, threats andtheir cyber physical consequences; (3) propose practical and efficient detection, prevention, mitigation andrecovery techniques and methodologies that will definitely harden and enhance the overall smart grid security.