Abstract
Conference Title: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm) Conference Start Date: 2016, Nov. 6 Conference End Date: 2016, Nov. 9 Conference Location: Sydney, Australia Hot-swappable devices play an important role for achieving high availability and easy maintainability in power grids, especially in substations. However, they also present a potential attack vector for malware to penetrate an otherwise highly closed system. We propose SwapGuard, a software-only solution that effectively guards a power grid system against swapped-in devices infected with malware. Built upon existing software-based attestation techniques, SwapGuard's design can securely handle hot-swapping event and accommodate different types of devices and networks. We evaluate SwapGuard on real-world power grid devices. The experimental results show that SwapGuard incurs low overhead to the operation of the system, in terms of the additional time required before a swapped-in device starts to function, the overhead to bootstrap the whole system, and the overhead to defend against unattested devices.