Simulation/Emulation-based Evaluation of Smart Grid Security Applications
Description
Abstract
Today's quality of life greatly depends on many large and complex communication networks, such as the Internet, cellular networks, and the communication infrastructure of national power grids. Currently the United States and many other countries are conducting a major upgrade of their electrical grids. This new "smart grid" is not a physically isolated network, like the older power grid was, but a complicated network of networks. That greatly increases the security concerns, ranging from hackers who gain access to control networks or create denial-of-service attacks on the networks themselves, to accidental causes, such as natural disasters or operator errors.
His work with respect to smart grid security has two strongly correlated streams. First, he led the development of a large-scale and high-fidelity network simulation/emulation testbed, so that technologies can be appropriately evaluated with modeling and simulation methodologies as well as real software/hardware testing before they are integrated into the grid. The testbed has been used by various industry partners, including IBM and Boeing. Second, he utilized the testbed to study various cyber-attacks in the smart grid, including a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) in an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and an event buffer flooding attack on a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. Future works will continue to focus on building a safe, secure and resilient communication networks, especially for critical infrastructure protection. Sample applications include (1) building a cyber-physical testbed for security evaluation and decision support in smart grid, (2) exploring Software Defined Networking (SDN) based architecture designs in smart substations and smart home networks for traffic management.
Biography
Kevin (Dong) Jin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a B.Eng. with first class honors in computer engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2005), and an M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2010). His research interests lie in the areas of cyber-security, networking, and modeling and simulation of large-scale computing and communication systems and networks, including the Internet and the Smart Grid. He received the best paper award at the 2012 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS). His email address is dongjin2@illinois.edu.