Smart grid security

Project Title:

Smart grid security

Supervisors:

Alireza Jolfaei, Syed Islam, Adil Bagirov

Contact person and email address:

Alireza Jolfaei a.jolfaei@federation.edu.au

A brief description of the project:

Recent findings, as documented in government reports and literature, indicate the growing threat of cyber-based attacks on smart grid and other critical infrastructures. Smart grid includes interdependent infrastructures including power transmission and distribution network, and the supporting telecommunications network. Complex interactions among these infrastructures lead to new pathways for attacks and failure propagation that are currently not well understood. This project takes a holistic multilevel approach to understand and characterise the interdependencies between these infrastructures, and devises mechanisms to enhance their robustness. A unique aspect of smart grid security that will be studied in this project is the critical importance of timeliness, and thus a trade-off between effectiveness of the mechanisms and the overheads introduced. The project is expected to provide practical techniques for making the smart grid more robust against failures and attacks, and enable it to recover from large-scale failures with less loss of capacity.