Dissertation Announcement for Uttam Adhikari. 6/18/15 at 9:00 AM

June 4, 2015

Dear faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, You are cordially invited to my Ph.D. dissertation oral defense. Dissertation Title: Event and intrusion detection systems for cyber physical power systems When: Thursday, June 18, 2015, 9:00 AM Where: Simrall 228 Candidate: Uttam Adhikari Degree: Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering Committee: Dr. Thomas H. Morris Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Major Professor ) Dr. Roger L. King Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Committee Member) Dr. Yong Fu Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Committee Member) Dr. Robert Wesley McGrew Assistant Research Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (Committee Member)

 

Abstract:

High speed data from Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) with Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) enables real and non-real time monitoring and control of power systems. The information and communication infrastructure used in WAMS efficiently transports information but introduces cyber security vulnerabilities. Adversaries may exploit such vulnerabilities to create cyber-attacks against the electric power grid. Control centers need to be updated to be resilient not only to well-known power system contingencies but also to cyber-attacks. Therefore, a combined event and intrusion detection systems (EIDS) is required that can provide precise classification for optimal response.

This dissertation describes a WAMS cyber-physical power system test bed that was developed to generate datasets and perform cyber-physical power system research related to cyber-physical system vulnerabilities, cyber-attack impact studies, and machine learning algorithms for EIDS. The test bed integrates WAMS components with a Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) with hardware in the loop (HIL) and includes various sized power systems with a wide variety of implemented power system and cyber-attack scenarios.

This work developed a novel data processing and compression method to address the WAMS big data problem. The State Tracking and Extraction Method (STEM) tracks system states from measurements and creates a compressed sequence of states for each observed scenario. Experiments showed STEM reduces data size significantly without losing key event information in the dataset that is useful to train EIDS and classify events.

Two EIDS are proposed and evaluated in this dissertation. Non-Nested Generalized Exemplars (NNGE) is a rule based classifier that creates rules in the form of hyperrectangles to classify events. NNGE uses rule generalization to create a model that has high accuracy and fast classification time. Hoeffding adaptive trees (HAT) is a decision tree classifier and uses incremental learning which is suitable for data stream mining. HAT creates decision trees on the fly from limited number of instances, uses low memory, has fast evaluation time, and adapts to concept changes. The experiments showed NNGE and HAT with STEM make effective EIDS that have high classification accuracy, low false positives, low memory usage, and fast classification times.

 

Best Regards,

Uttam Adhikari