OPNET based modeling and simulation of DoS attack of digital substation

ZHU Ma1, LI Yong1, ZHANG Jianmin2, HOU Lianquan2, JIN Naizheng1, CHEN Yi2

（1.State Grid Shaoxing Electric Power Supply Company, Shaoxing 312000, China;
2.College of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China)

Abstract: Aimming at the problem that DoS (Denial of Service) as the most serious cyber attack for digital substation, a modeling of data flow with different properties as periodic, random, sudden response was firstly introduced, followed by a simulation modeling of DoS attack based on the SYNFlood principle; the module design and simulation implementation scheme based on OPNET platform was proposed in detail. The simulation scenario was selected as the star network where the control bay server was under the SYN_flood attack, and the case studies were made for wideband of 10BaseT and 100BaseT data link. The simulation results gives the performances of the bay server before and after SYN_flood attack, and the attack consequences are long stay at a high CPU utilization, time delay increasing of TCP connection, and the increasing of link throughput to exhaust the link band, etc., in which the attempts of DoS are exposed to make the bay server disable to response the normal business request, i.e., to deny the service.

Key words: digital substation; communication and information network; denial of service (DoS); attack simulation; OPNET