A Common Automation Framework for Cyber-Physical Power System Defense

Abstract

As the power grid becomes more complex and integrated with communication networks, cyber-attacks become an increasingly relevant threat. CYPRES (Cyber Physical Resilient Energy Systems) is a system for simulating cyber and physical attacks on a power grid by comprehensively modeling a cyber-physical hardware-in-the-loop power system. However, the CYPRES system is tedious to spin up, as multiple sub-systems of the framework involve interdependencies across different applications. This paper details a common automation framework for the CYPRES sys- tem that both removes this manual overhead from running the system and drastically improves CYPRES’ initialization speed. With the Jenkins, a continuous integration/continuous development tool, the author has established this automation infrastructure, RESAuto, for CYPRES system and demonstrated the benefits and effectiveness of automating manually intensive sub-systems opera- tions with much simpler operations and less time consumption. This automation system makes it much easier to test more complex threat scenarios for larger, more realistic, and manually intensive scenarios. In addition to this, RESAuto also provides a real-time dashboard that shows simulation status and network traffic, allowing users to monitor RESLab’s distributed computing resources at a glance