Impact evaluation of IEC 62351 cybersecurity on IEC 61850 communications performance

Abstract

Power system is not exempt from the cyber security threats that threaten almost all digitalised society sectors and activities. Consequences of cyber-attacks to power control infrastructures can be extremely significant for operators’ core business, but also for most of the essential services of developed society, even potentially affecting safety of people. Fortunately countermeasures exist as there are international standard that specify which countermeasures have to be applied to raise the security level and to allow interoperability between operators’, vendors’, and customers’ devices. Cyber security countermeasures have an impact on performance that must be evaluated early enough to assess the adequacy of a solution, or to select the most appropriate configuration among multiple alternatives. This article describes a platform developed to measure the impact of cyber security measures indicated by the TLS profiles specified by IEC 62351 standard series. The experimental platform is described and the performances of different cypher suites supported by the standard are reported for communications using a IEC 61850 protocol stack.