LADIDS: Lightning-Authenticated Distributed Intrusion Detection System for the Power Grid

Abstract

Recent events affecting power grids (such as the Ukrainian blackout in 2015) have highlighted the vulnerabilities in modern power systems, especially power substations which form the backbone of electricity networks. There have been significant efforts among researchers to develop effective intrusion detection systems (IDS) in order to prevent such attacks or reduce their damaging consequences. However, all of the existing techniques require some level of trust from components on the SCADA network; hence, they are still vulnerable to sophisticated attacks that would compromise the SCADA system completely. This research presents a radio frequency-based distributed IDS which remains reliable even when the entire SCADA system is considered untrusted. The developed air-gapped sensor is also robust against replay/ spoofing attacks, meaning that the attacker is not able to feed it fake data.