Virtualization in digital substations is a rising trend in the power sector, opening up interesting research avenues. The virtualization of intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) is thought to enable more flexible and agile cybersecurity software updates and patching processes while seamlessly integrating with current physical IEDs. However, no studies have yet considered a general cybersecurity assessment for such novel hybrid systems. To fill this gap, a systematic cybersecurity assessment of a digital substation composed of hybrid (virtual and physical) IEDs is presented in this paper. A testbed was developed to assess the different attack vectors with a focus on targeting virtual machines (resource exhaustion) and injection attacks on IEC 61850-compliant communication streams. A hybrid protection selectivity use case was successfully demonstrated with multiple targeted cyber attacks on the testbed where the non-attacked IED successfully cleared the grid fault. The attacks’ impacts ranged from minor to major effects on the IEDs’ tripping signals (and eventually circuit breaker actions) including forced signal delays, signal latching, and signal drops. The results of this study highlight the importance of providing a proper cybersecurity by design strategy for integrating hybrid substation systems with virtualization technologies.

This article implements and validates the performance of a virtual intelligent electronic device (vIED) framework for digital substations using a real-time (RT) simulation environment. The work looks toward the future design of protection, automation, and control systems, an evolution of the digital substation design based on IEC 61850 and virtualization technology. An RT simulation setup was developed to speed up and enhance the deployment and maintenance of vIEDs with a novel well-defined test methodology. Several scenarios were tested by varying the number of vIEDs and relevant (communication, scalability, and functionality) configuration criteria. In addition, we assessed the efficiency of a software-defined communication network for the vIED framework and its adaptability to dynamic scaling of the network under transient data traffic loads. The tests demonstrated the efficient performance of vIEDs across various system configurations, particularly for requirements on the response time and network transfer latency. The findings showcase the significance of proper design and testing methodology that can be benchmarked against other virtualization platforms for substation systems.

As power system's operational technology converges with innovative information and communication technologies, the need for extensive resilience testing for scenarios covering the electrical grid, networking bottlenecks, as well as cyber security threats, become a necessity. This paper proposes a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary simulation framework to test virtualized intelligent electronic devices (vIEDs), considering 1) functional requirements, 2) performance and quality of service of the underlying communication network using software-defined networking, and 3) cyber security intrusion detection schemes. This work serves as a reference for researchers interested in the grid modernization of information and communication infrastructure for future power systems. Six different cyber security attack surfaces have been identified within the framework scope. It was observed that migration of vIEDs due to device maintenance or external anomalies is interesting from an operational perspective yet still poses significant security threats. Therefore, both host-based and network-based intrusion detection schemes were analyzed. Also, the setup has been mapped to an offshore wind case study demonstrating its potential and possible scenarios to simulate.