Schneider Electric, as leader in energy and automation digital solutions collaborates in the H2020 ELECTRON project. Schneider Electric is focusing its contribution on one of the four use cases, Use Case 3 “Protecting the Renewables Energy Chain from Cyberattacks and Data Leaking” specifically in the “Penetration testing on substation assets” scenario.
The objective of this scenario is to detect and mitigate various cyberattacks against a substation environment. ELECTRON is expected to detect such malicious activities, taking into account the characteristics and the requirements of the substation environment.
Schneider Electric contributes to the use case with its substation devices. In particular, it has created an environment similar to the real wind farm with its EPAS Gateway device and its remote terminal units (RTUs).
The EPAS gateway will be responsible for exchanging data between the two existing networks, the substation network and the corporate network. In other words, it will be in charge of gathering the data and transferring it between the networks. Therefore, this device will operate as the SCU in the real scenario.
On the other hand, RTUs are microprocessor-controlled devices, which connect physical world objects to a distributed control system or SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system transmitting telemetry data to a master system and using messages from the master supervisory system to control the connected objects.
Well, once the devices included in the Schneider scenario and the objective have been defined, the following diagram shows the final result of the pilot:
It can be seen that to communicate between these devices several industrial communication protocols are used.
This last part, industrial protocols, is where Schneider has focused on during the development phase of the project, because its devices are critical assets of the system, and it is necessary to take cybersecurity measures for it.
To this end, it has developed secure communications in the EPAS Gateway device to increase cybersecurity in EPES infrastructures, securing industrial protocols using the TLS layer to encrypt communication.
In addition, thanks to the participation in the ELECTRON project, Schneider Electric will be able to validate and test its developments in a real environment thanks to the penetration tests that will be carried out by experts who collaborate in the project.
Finally, in this scenario, it is intended to deploy the components LADS from ATOS, SIEM from ATOS, ARMY from UBITECH, DARCY from UMU, NIRO from CERTH and SDN Controller from UOWN where they will allow the detection and mitigation of any possible threat found in the pilot.