A Sustainable Dispositional and Situational Security Awareness Model for Smart Grids

The continuous introduction of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) in smart grids has improved the reliability of operations and communication among components in the grids. However, such technologies can become unsustainable and further introduce security vulnerabilities. Any potential impact of security attacks on a smart grid component such as a sensor, either through internal or external adversaries, may lead to a breakdown of operations in the grids. Additionally, the large number of components along with their dependencies on emerging technologies may hinder the ability of grid operators to sustainably identify security flaws. Note that sustainability (of smart grid security) in this work refers to the ability to mitigate security vulnerabilities or attacks without overdependence on grid operators or emerging technologies that introduce high computational overheads. In this paper, we propose a sustainable dispositional and situational security awareness model through the utilization of a Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) to effectively reveal and mitigate security vulnerabilities in the smart grids without overdependence on emerging technologies. We conducted some case studies on a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to show the usefulness of our model.