The rise of distributed energy resources (DERs), which are facilities owned by individuals or small businesses and capable of producing, storing, and redistributing power to energy grids, is revolutionizing how electricity is utilized worldwide.
The technology is spreading as society explores for alternate energy sources, but its quick development opens up a whole new set of weaknesses that are susceptible to hackers.
Smart inverters are external equipment that allow DERs, such as residential solar panels and electric car chargers, to connect to power networks.
According to a recent study by Concordia researchers, the use of digital information and communication technology by these devices makes them vulnerable to numerous attacks by bad actors, which could have detrimental effects on the general public.
The paper, published in the IEEE: Transactions on Power Electronics journal, surveys the landscape of smart inverter cybersecurity and identifies attack strategies at the device and grid level. It also looks at ways to defend against, mitigate and prevent them.
“We are still in the first decade of trying to understand the problem and identifying the most prominent risks,” says the paper’s co-author Jun Yan, associate professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering.
“Threats are inevitable. We have so many homeowners and third parties using these devices that having a perfect line of defence is impossible. We must look at our strategic priorities to start.”
This paper will provide us with a good starting point for our many research projects. For the broader research community, this lays out the solutions that exist and where are the gaps that still require one. It can also help the industry review their practices and improve their baseline security.
Jun Yan
Yuanling Li, a Concordia Ph.D. student and research intern at Ericsson’s Global Artificial Intelligence Accelerator (GAIA), is the paper’s lead author.
Risks at the device and grid levels
The researchers explain the various ways that threats to individual devices or the entire grid might be used to attack smart inverters. Attacks on devices can interfere with communications with other devices or with the utility controlling energy flow, but attacks on hardware are also a possibility.
They list potential attack tactics that could be used against communication links between the inverters and devices as reconnaissance, replay, DDoS, and man-in-the-middle. Hardware is the target of techniques like physical firmware attacks and hall spoofing, which manipulates the electromagnetic fields around a device.
The researchers warn of the potential for assaults on distributed control systems and centralized control structures at the microgrid level. Many of these attacks are made to obstruct directives from the control to the devices or to insert misleading data into the communications stream between the device and the regulator.
The capacity of the microgrid to distribute energy can be significantly hampered by these, which can result in oscillations of power, voltage, and frequency.
Part of a global network
The study was conducted as a part of the Mitacs-Ericsson GAIA multi-institutional research effort, which brings together a network of academics from Canada, the United States, India, and Europe. Li is one of 25 Concordia graduate students taking part in the effort, and she has been studying ethical hacking strategies to find weaknesses in crucial infrastructure.
“We use AI technologies in penetration testing of cyber-physical smart grids,” he says. “The goal is to use deep reinforcement learning to find efficient and automatic ways to penetrate smart grids and create a negative physical impact.”
As a leading member of the recently created, federally funded National Cybersecurity Consortium, Yan points out that Concordia is uniquely qualified to lead the fight against this emerging threat.
“This paper will provide us with a good starting point for our many research projects. For the broader research community, this lays out the solutions that exist and where are the gaps that still require one,” he says. “It can also help the industry review their practices and improve their baseline security.”
