Today's quality of life greatly depends on many large and complex
communication networks, such as the Internet, cellular networks,
and the communication infrastructure of national power grids.
Currently the United States and many other countries are
conducting a major upgrade of their electrical grids. This new
"smart grid" is not a physically isolated network, like the older
power grid was, but a complicated network of networks. That
greatly increases the security concerns, ranging from hackers who
gain access to control networks or create denial-of-service
attacks on the networks themselves, to accidental causes, such as
natural disasters or operator errors.
His work with respect to smart grid security has two strongly
correlated streams. First, he led the development of a large-scale
and high-fidelity network simulation/emulation testbed, so that
technologies can be appropriately evaluated with modeling and
simulation methodologies as well as real software/hardware testing
before they are integrated into the grid. The testbed has been
used by various industry partners, including IBM and Boeing.
Second, he utilized the testbed to study various cyber-attacks in
the smart grid, including a distributed denial of service attack
(DDoS) in an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and an event
buffer flooding attack on a supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA) system. Future works will continue to focus on
building a safe, secure and resilient communication networks,
especially for critical infrastructure protection. Sample
applications include (1) building a cyber-physical testbed for
security evaluation and decision support in smart grid, (2)
exploring Software Defined Networking (SDN) based architecture
designs in smart substations and smart home networks for traffic
management.