An integrated testbed for locally monitoring SCADA systems in smart grids

Abstract A testbed for evaluating if and how process-aware monitoring may increase the security of decentralized SCADA networks in power grids is presented. The testbed builds on the co-simulation framework Mosaik, and co-simulates in an integrated way, the power distribution network on different voltage levels, as well as the control network (Modbus/TCP). The existing simulators were extended to allow topology changes, and a controller (RTU) simulator connected to a SCADA server enabling remote control was implemented. Using the developed testbed, a recently proposed local monitoring approach was investigated. The results show that for so-called interlocks the proposed monitoring approach prevents the execution of 33.3% of the commands, that would result in an unsafe state of the power distribution grid. Furthermore, it is shown that unsafe transformer tap positions can also be avoided. To illustrate the relevance and importance of the proposed testbed, a detailed comparison of related work on process-aware intrusion detection approaches and testbeds combining (parts of) the control network and the power grid is provided.