Smart Electrical Substation Cybersecurity Model Based on WPA3 and Cooperative Hybrid Intrusion Detection System (CHIDS)

Abstract

Cyberattacks represent a real challenge against exploiting the benefits of employing wireless communication networks (WCN) in the environment of industrial infrastructures. This is related to the negative effect of the security countermeasures on the system performance of such infrastructures in particular the real-time applications such as high voltage devices protection. This work suggests a cybersecurity model to protect a wireless communication network for a typical smart electrical substation against expected cyberattacks taking into consideration the requirements of system performance. The suggested cybersecurity model depends on three cooperated methods. The first method is dividing the wireless coverage area into multiple wireless zones using switched access points. The second method secures the WCN using WiFi protected access 3 (WPA3) and a cooperative hybrid intrusion detection system (CHIDS). Hence, the combination of WPA3-CHIDS based on the new architecture model provides a robust level of protection against threats and lightweight security schemes as possible to overcome the challenges of system performance requirements. Moreover, the proposed CHIDS offers four different types of detection: access control-based detection, signature-based detection, anomaly-based detection, and special parameters-based detection. The third method offers a new architecture scheme to provide a secure and reliable key management module based on WPA3 using a local authenticator rather than depending on the RADIUS server to mitigate the attacks from outside the electrical substation. The results of system performance indicate that the adopted authentication and encryption mechanisms do not break the latency requirements of real-time protection (less than 4 ms). To our knowledge, this effort is the first work that submits a security model addressing the requirements of substation automation performance for the wireless network of smart electrical substations.