Application and Evaluation of a Substation Threat Modeling Language for Automatic Attack Graph Generation

The substation plays an important role in the electric grid and can transform voltage when distributing electricity, as well as serve other functions. The modern substation is a Cyber-Physical System, which inherently makes it complex and vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Two methods for assessing cybersecurity are the use of threat models that give an overview of the potential threats of a system and attack graphs that can give details of potential paths of an attack. In this paper, we describe a parser for automatically creating threat models and attack graphs of a substation by using a threat modeling language for Substation Automation Systems and the configuration files of substations according to IEC 61850. By modeling attack scenarios and discussing the automatically generated attack graphs with experts in the industry, we were able to evaluate the threat modeling language and show how it can be used to generate accurate attack scenarios.