HA-Grid: Security Aware Hazard Analysis for Smart Grids

Luca Maria Castiglione, Zhongyuan Hau, Pudong Ge, Kenneth T. Co, Luis Muñoz-González, Fei Teng, Emil Lupu

Abstract: Attacks targeting smart grid infrastructures can result in the disruptions of power supply as well as damages to costly equipment, with significant impact on safety as well as on end-consumers. It is therefore of essence to identify attack paths in the infrastructure that lead to safety violations and to determine critical components that must be protected. In this paper, we introduce a methodology (HA-Grid) that incorporates both safety and security modelling of smart grid infrastructure to analyse the impact of cyber threats on the safety of smart grid infrastructures. HA-Grid is applied on a smart grid test-bed to identify attack paths that lead to safety hazards, and to determine the common nodes in these attack paths as critical components that must be protected.