A Best-Effort Damage Mitigation Model for Cyber-Attacks on Smart Grids

Despite the availability of sophisticated defense mechanisms, smart grid security breaches do happen causing serious damages. In the age of cheap and popular internet-enabled commodity products such as smart home devices, health monitors, vehicles, etc., attackers are finding increasingly more weakly-protected entry points to breach critical infrastructures such as smart grids. When fast changing attack signatures are used as a strategy to force the security apparatuses to relearn the attack properties and rethink countermeasures, critical time is lost and substantial damage can result. In this paper, we elicit an attack strategy that has the potential to breach smart grid security for which we have limited defense, and the detection of the attack takes substantially long time. We propose that in such scenarios, we deploy measures to isolate sub-networks to deny attackers access to our most valuable assets. We discuss the requirements to architect such a damage control protocol and the algorithm to partition the network using a save the best-first strategy.