GCAP: Cyber Attack Progression Framework for Smart Grid Infrastructures

Interdisciplinary developments like the smart grid (SG) provide enhanced functionality like efficient power delivery, reliability, and safety while ensuring the smooth integration of traditional and renewable sources of power. Unfortunately, the progressive utilization of the SG and its applications makes them a prime target for cyber attacks. In this article, we propose the grid cyber attack progression (GCAP) framework for SG security. The proposed framework provides higher flexibility in how SG organizations can prepare for complex cyber attacks by incorporating behavior patterns like the adversary skipping and/or backtracking stages during attack progression, while still maintaining a sequential and hierarchical structure. Unlike contemporary frameworks, GCAP provides us with cyber attack progression from the defender's perspective. We illustrate the advantages of the proposed framework over established frameworks for SG security, after which we evaluate the framework on multiple case studies on real-world cyber attacks on power systems. Finally, we identify defensive solutions that can be laid down in every stage of the GCAP framework to provide more security and protection for SG infrastructures.