Distributed VSCADA: An integrated heterogeneous framework for power system utility security modeling and simulation

The economic machinery of the United States is reliant on complex large-scale cyber-physical systems which include electric power grids, oil and gas systems, transportation systems, etc. Protection of these systems and their control from security threats and improvement of the robustness and resilience of these systems, are important goals. Since all these systems have Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) in their control centers, a number of test beds have been developed at various laboratories. Usually on such test beds, people are trained to operate and protect these critical systems. In this paper, we describe a virtualized distributed test bed that we developed for modeling and simulating SCADA applications and to carry out related security research. The test bed is a virtualized by integrating various heterogeneous simulation components. This test bed can be reconfigured to simulate the SCADA of a power system, or a transportation system or any other critical systems, provided a back-end domain specific simulator for such systems are attached to it. In this paper, we describe how we created a scalable architecture capable of simulating larger infrastructures and by integrating communication models to simulate different network protocols. We also developed a series of middleware packages that integrates various simulation platforms into our test bed using the Python scripting language. To validate the usability of the test bed, we briefly describe how a power system SCADA scenario can be modeled and simulated in our test bed.