Network breaker: Practical countermeasure to denial of service attacks on smart grid

초록

More and more smart grid networks are connected based on the IP protocol, resulting in more attack threats. Denial of service (DoS) is one of the most critical threats because it is easy to perform but has a significant effect. This paper deals with the current vulnerability of real-world smart grids to DoS attacks and proposes a novel applicable countermeasure. We found that smart grid devices in the real world are highly vulnerable to DoS attacks, as a result of actual experiments and investigations that focused on the network capabilities of gridspecific devices. Next, we claim that, due to the characteristics of smart grid networks, it is practically difficult to apply general countermeasures. As an alternative, we propose a practical solution, the Network Breaker. By keeping the two rules, the hierarchical tree structure and network capability differentiation, the impact of DoS attacks on smart grid can be minimized. Our method defends the smart grid against DoS attacks without additional cost or resource consumption using a novel approach that intentionally reduces hardware performance of communication modules. We conducted comprehensive experiments and the results showed that the Network Breaker localizes the impact of DoS attacks effectively.

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