Resilience Enhancement of Pilot Protection in Power Systems

Concerns about the cybersecurity and resilience of power systems have heightened in electric utilities and regulatory agencies over the past decade mainly because of the unpredictable target, location and scale of cyberattacks and the potential severity of consequences. The cybersecurity of pilot protection is paramount in bulk power systems considering their prevalence and the crucial role they play in protecting critical assets and preventing large system disturbances and major blackouts. This paper investigates the resilience of pilot protection using a co-simulation platform based on OPAL-RT simulator and Riverbed Modeler. It is demonstrated that software-defined networking for operational technology (OT SDN) significantly improves the resilience of pilot protection to false data injection (FDI) attacks compared to traditional networks. Moreover, the resilience of OT SDN based pilot protection to denial of service (DoS) attack against the SDN controller is investigated both in the proactive and reactive modes of operation. The simulation results verified the resilience of OT SDN controller in OT SDN based pilot protection to DoS attacks in the proactive mode of operation.