Attack Graph Based Metrics for Identifying Critical Cyber Assets in Electric Grid Infrastructure
Date
April 27, 2018
Description
The electric grid is a critical cyber-physical infrastructure that serves as lifeline for modern society. With the increasing trend of cyber attacks, electric grid security has become a significant concern. System operators have the difficult task of reducing the risk exposure and maintaining operational reliability under the constant threat of cyber attacks. Therefore, appropriate security metrics for assessing and monitoring the risk to the cyber-physical power grid infrastructure would be valuable. Our previous work explore security metrics that can be used to monitor the security posture and risk exposure of the electric grid infrastructure. These metrics take both the cyber security posture and physical impact of an attack into account. However, most of the results are based on single failure on the physical perspective. In this work, we focus on developing new risk metrics that evaluate those potentially vulnerable assets after an initial attack. We also build cyber-physical model for IEEE RTS-96 in order to illustrate the usefulness of new metrics.