Power grid takedown: A new how-to -- Domino effect could short-circuit US West Coast

The Register ^ | 16th September 2009 13:22 GMT | John Leyden

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

A well targeted attack against a small power grid subnetwork might result in a cascading failure across the entire US West Coast electricity grid, according to a Chinese academic.

A team led by Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China's Dalian University of Technology, discovered the potential weakness after using publicly available data to model the West Coast US electricity supply networks and its components. Cascading failures led to the August 2003 blackout in the north-east US.

The Chinese team expected to discover that attacks against highly loaded networks carried the greater damage potential. The group analysed the power loading and the connections of each grid sub-network to work out the conditions under which they would trip-out under a variety of failure scenarios.

If backbone systems were taken out, conventional thinking suggests, demand would swamp smaller networks. However the team actually found that, in the right circumstances, taking out a lightly used sub-network first might have a greater effect, the New Scientist reports.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is reportedly poring over the report, released last November but overlooked (by the media, at least) until last week.

John Verrico, a DHS technology spokesman, told the New Scientist that countermeasures are already in development. "Our engineers are working on a self-limiting, high-temperature superconductor technology which would stop and prevent power surges generated anywhere in the system from spreading to other substations. Pilot tests in New York City may be ready as soon as 2010."

[HiTech RedNeck]

Well thank you honorable Chinese for alerting the whole world to this. Why don’t we pore over the Chinese power system architecture and return the compliment?

[tx_eggman]

Just keep your stinking hands off the Texas grid ..

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From a link at the Register article:

Spies hacked US electrical grid, says WSJ

*********************************EXCERPT*******************************

The Russians, the Chinese, and "others"

By Austin Modine in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Security, 8th April 2009 18:00 GMT

Foreign cyber-spies have reportedly been infiltrating the US electrical grid and planting software that can be used to destroy key components.

According to the Wall Street Journal - which cites unnamed national security officials - electro-spooks hailing from China, Russia, and "other countries" are trying to navigate and control the power grid as well as other US infrastructure like water and sewage.

The intruders don't appear to have attempted to cause any damage yet, but US intelligence officials worry they'll try during a crisis or war, the paper said.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have warned lax cyber-security may leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to terrorists and saboteurs — although usually specific countries aren't fingered as culprits.

[GOPJ]

Scary world, eh?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Brett66]

This would be a first step in battling global warming. < /Van Jones >< /Al Gore >

[Domandred]

Blackout of 1996

snips...

On August 10, 1996, during a period of high temperatures and high demand for electricity, a major transmission line failure knocked out power to 4 million people in eight West Coast states.

The cause of the chaos? At 3:42 p.m., a power line sagged into filbert trees near Hillsboro, Oregon, just southwest of Portland. It was the fourth power line in Oregon to fail in less than two hours. Five minutes later, at 3:47 p.m., a line shorted out in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from the Portland/Hillsboro area. At 3:48 p.m., the 13 turbines at McNary Dam, on the Columbia about 190 miles upstream from Portland, quit operating. The combination of the power outages and the temporary loss of McNary triggered a cascade of power outages as far away as southern California.

[DTogo]

Well d’uh. Transmission lines and substations are probably the most unsecured and out-in-the-open soft targets all over the landscape.

[Domandred]

Found it interesting that an article on a possible west coast blackout didn’t mention the actual west coast black out.

[MrEdd]

Or a series of unsophisticated attacks in scattered plces, taking down long transmission lines would have the exact same effect.

The power grid, by the very nature of it’s function can no more be protected from military style disruption than the railway network, and is an even more vital target.

This is elementary logistics. Boot camp class material.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Got to watch out for those rascally filbert trees.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks for adding that....

[null and void]

ping

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And the brilliant legislatures of California think it is smart to have dirty power generation plants outside the border of the state and maybe even the country....

[Domandred]

I learned to always carry a pocket flashlight that day. Was working in a windowless room in a windowless area of an unfinished building. Room I was in didn’t have emergency lighting installed yet, and neither did the wing of the building I was in.

Man that was dark.

Luckily I had a lighter in my pocket to see for short bursts of time while I made my way through network and power cabling to a finished wing that had emergency lighting.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

A model for cascading failures in scale-free networks w...
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

 A model for cascading failures in scale-free networks with a breakdown probability
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 388, Issue 7, 1 April 2009, Pages 1289-1298
Jian-Wei Wang, Li-Li Rong

Abstract

Considering that not all overload nodes will be removed from networks due to some effective measures to protect them, we propose a new cascading model with a breakdown probability. Adopting the initial load of a node j to be L_j=[k_j(∑_mΓjk_m)]^α with k_j and Γ_j being the degree of the node j and the set of its neighboring nodes, respectively, where α is a tunable parameter, we investigate the relationship between some parameters and universal robustness characteristics against cascading failures on scale-free networks. According to a new measure originated from a phase transition from the normal state to collapse, the numerical simulations show that Barabási–Albert (BA) networks reach the strongest robustness level against cascading failures when the tunable parameter α=0.5, while not relating to the breakdown probability. We furthermore explore the effect of the average degree k for network robustness, thus obtaining a positive correlation between k and network robustness. We then analyze the effect of the breakdown probability on the network robustness and confirm by theoretical predictions this universal robustness characteristic observed in simulations. Our work may have practical implications for controlling various cascading-failure-induced disasters in the real world.

Purchase PDF (1785 K)

Edge-based-attack induced cascading failures on scale-f... Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications  Edge-based-attack induced cascading failures on scale-free networks Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 388, Issue 8, 15 April 2009, Pages 1731-1737 Jian-Wei Wang, Li-Li Rong Abstract Most previous existing works on cascading failures only focused on attacks on nodes rather than on edges. In this paper, we discuss the response of scale-free networks subject to two different attacks on edges during cascading propagation, i.e., edge removal by either the descending or ascending order of the loads. Adopting a cascading model with a breakdown probability p of an overload edge and the initial load (kikj)α of an edge ij, where ki and kj are the degrees of the nodes connected by the edge ij and α is a tunable parameter, we investigate the effects of two attacks for the robustness of Barabási–Albert (BA) scale-free networks against cascading failures. In the case of α<1, our investigation by the numerical simulations leads to a counterintuitive finding that BA scale-free networks are more sensitive to attacks on the edges with the lowest loads than the ones with the highest loads, not relating to the breakdown probability. In addition, the same effect of two attacks in the case of α=1 may be useful in furthering studies on the control and defense of cascading failures in many real-life networks. We then confirm by the theoretical analysis these results observed in simulations. Purchase PDF (1657 K)

Attack vulnerability of scale-free networks due to casc... Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications  Attack vulnerability of scale-free networks due to cascading failures Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 387, Issue 26, 15 November 2008, Pages 6671-6678 Jianwei Wang, Lili Rong, Liang Zhang, Zhongzhi Zhang Abstract In this paper, adopting the initial load of a node i to be with ki being the degree of the node i, we propose a cascading model based on a load local redistribution rule and examine cascading failures on the typical network, i.e., the BA network with the scale-free property. We find that the BA scale-free network reaches the strongest robustness level in the case of α=1 and the robustness of the network has a positive correlation with the average degree k, where the robustness is quantified by a transition from normal state to collapse. In addition, we further discuss the effects of two different attacks for the robustness against cascading failures on our cascading model and find an interesting result, i.e., the effects of two different attacks, strongly depending to the value α. These results may be very helpful for real-life networks to avoid cascading-failure-induced disasters. Purchase PDF (1287 K)

A robust matching model of capacity to defense cascadin... Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications  A robust matching model of capacity to defense cascading failure on complex networks Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 387, Issue 25, 1 November 2008, Pages 6431-6435 H.J. Sun, H. Zhao, J.J. Wu Abstract How to control the cascading failure has become a hot topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new matching model of capacity by developing a profit function to defense cascading failures on artificially created scale-free networks and the real network structure of the North American power grid. Results show that our matching model can enhance the network robustness efficiently, which is particularly important for the design of networks to deduce the damage triggered by the cascading failures. Purchase PDF (570 K)

Effects of the cascading failures on scale-free traffic... Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications  Effects of the cascading failures on scale-free traffic networks Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 378, Issue 2, 15 May 2007, Pages 505-511 J.J. Wu, Z.Y. Gao, H.J. Sun Abstract In this paper, we consider the artificial scale-free traffic network with dynamic weights (cost) and focus on how the removal strategies (flow-based removal, betweenness-based removal and mix-based removal) affect the damage of cascading failures based on the user-equilibrium (UE) assignment, which ensures the balance of flow on the traffic network. Experiment simulation shows that different removal strategies can bring large dissimilarities of the efficiency and damage after the intentional removal of an edge. We show that the mix-based removal of a single edge might reduce the damage of cascading failures and delay the breakdown time, especially for larger reserve capacity coefficient α. This is particularly important for real-world networks with a highly hetereogeneous distribution of flow, i.e., traffic and transportation networks, logistics networks and electrical power grids. Purchase PDF (200 K)

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Yeh,...see #17...lots of studying going on...

[12Gauge687]

Man, you don’t know the half of it. After speaking to friends at Special Operations Command (who alluded to several scary scenarios - all possible within the next five years), I’m just hoping someone is on the ball. These reports by the Chinese were mentioned by my friends several months ago and were being interpreted a number of ways.

[loungitude]

“Our engineers are working on a self-limiting, high-temperature superconductor technology which would stop and prevent power surges generated anywhere in the system from spreading to other substations. Pilot tests in New York City may be ready as soon as 2010.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Where’s the BS meter?