Tabulating Cybersecurity Solutions for Substations: Towards Pragmatic Design and Planning

Electric substations play an important role in the proper functioning of power grid systems. Recent incidents such as the Ukraine case have demonstrated the high risk of attacks against substations. A wealth of existing and emerging cyber defense mechanisms have been suggested for protecting substations, each with different defense objectives and using a variety of approaches that have their own strength and weakness. In this paper, we propose a pragmatic framework for reasoning about the different mechanisms by allowing critical comparisons of their features and the planning of their composition. The scope of our framework is general and can cover heterogeneous defense mechanisms, such as software integrity and physical zoning. We define specific criteria in our framework to compare those defense mechanisms in order to generate pragmatic deployment suggestions. We demonstrate the benefits of our framework by conducting a case study inspired by the Ukraine attack.