Industrial protocols have historically been optimized for functionality and performance without considering the embedding of solid security features. Smart grids constitute a clear example, as these critical infrastructures rely heavily on power system protocols for automation. However, increasing interconnection requirements have brought novel security challenges that are difficult to mitigate with isolation and legacy lightweight security approaches. Although new industrial protocol extensions address security issues, it could be infeasible to incorporate them into already deployed infrastructures. This work proposes a proxy-based solution designed for an existing SSH3 embodiment built on top of the QUIC protocol, offering standalone proxy mechanisms that are independent of established protocols. To accomplish this, we developed a reverse socket proxy implementation for SSH3. Then, we evaluated the latency overhead of our solution to assess its practicality in industrial environments. Our results have shown that, leveraging our QUIC-based proxy solution, we can achieve average latency improvements ranging between 16% and 40%.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, with applications spanning from theconsumerdomain tocommercialandindustrialsystems. The steep growth and vast adoption of IoT devices reinforce the importance of sound and robust cybersecurity practices during the device development life cycles. IoT-related vulnerabilities, if successfully exploited can affect, not only the device itself but also the application field in which the IoT device operates. Evidently, identifying and addressing every single vulnerability are an arduous, if not impossible, task. Attack taxonomies can assist in classifying attacks and their corresponding vulnerabilities. Security countermeasures and best practices can then be leveraged to mitigate threats and vulnerabilities before they emerge into catastrophic attacks and ensure overall secure IoT operation. Therefore, in this article, we provide an attack taxonomy, which takes into consideration the different layers of the IoT stack, i.e., device, infrastructure, communication, and service, and each layer’s designated characteristics, which can be exploited by adversaries. Furthermore, using nine real-world cybersecurity incidents that had targeted IoT devices deployed in the consumer, commercial, and industrial sectors, we describe the IoT-related vulnerabilities, exploitation procedures, attacks, impacts, and potential mitigation mechanisms and protection strategies. These (and many other) incidents highlight the underlying security concerns of IoT systems and demonstrate the potential attack impacts of such connected ecosystems, while the proposed taxonomy provides a systematic procedure to categorize attacks based on the affected layer and corresponding impact.

The distributed generation capabilities of microgrids (MGs) arise as essential assets in enhancing grid resilience. The integration of distributed energy sources, controllable loads, and prosumers necessitates the deployment of potent control and communication synergies. While those synergies transform MGs into cyber-physical systems through information technologies able to sense, control, and actuate local resources and loads, they inadvertently expose MGs to cyber-attack threats. Increasing the security of critical communication and control systems against “black swan” events, i.e., high-impact low-probability cyber-physical incidents, is a major priority for MG operations. Such incidents, if left unabated, can intensify and elicit system dynamics instability, eventually causing outages and system failures. In this article, we develop an integrated approach for multiagent MG systems able to perform the detection of malicious cyber-physical attacks based on subspace methods. We employ the small-signal model of an autonomous/islanded MG and consider different attack models targeting the MG’s secondary frequency control. The attack detector is constructed via identifying the stable kernel representation of the autonomous cyber-physical MG in the attack-free case. We illustrate the impact of the attack models as well as the feasibility of the developed detection method in simulation models of the Canadian urban benchmark distribution system.

In this work we propose a new scheme for semi-active Wake-Up Receiver circuits that exhibits remarkable sensitivity beyond -70 dBm, while state-of-the-art receivers illustrate sensitivity of up to -55 dBm. The receiver employs the typical principle of an envelope detector that harvests RF energy from its antenna, while it employs a nano-power operation amplifier to intensify the obtained signal prior to the final decoding that is realized with the aid of a comparator circuit. It operates at the 868 MHz ISM band using OOK signals propagated through LoRa transceivers, while also supporting addressing capabilities in order to awake only the specified network's nodes. The power expenditure of the developed receiver is as low as 580 nA, remaining at the same power consumption levels as the state-of-the-art implementations.

Electric energy systems are undergoing significant changes to improve system reliability and accommodate increasing power demands. The penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) including roof-top solar panels, energy storage, electric vehicles, etc., enables the on-site generation of economically dispatchable power curtailing operational costs. The effective control of DERs requires communication between utilities and DER system operators. The communication protocols employed for DER management and control lack sophisticated cybersecurity features and can compromise power systems secure operation if malicious control commands are issued to DERs. To overcome authentication-related protocol issues, we present a bolt-on security extension that can be implemented on Distributed Network Protocol v3 (DNP3). We port an authentication framework, DERauth, into DNP3, and utilize real-time measurements from a simulated DER battery energy storage system to enhance communication security. We evaluate our framework in a testbed setup using DNP3 master and outstation devices performing secure authentication by leveraging the entropy of DERs.