Deterministic Dendritic Cell Algorithm Application to Smart Grid Cyber-Attack Detection

The Distributed Network Protocol v3.0 (DNP3) is one of the most widely used protocols for smart grid communications. Security challenges which could cause great scale of damages to critical infrastructure like the smart grid have emerged in recent years. This paper investigates the attacks that target smart grids which utilize the DNP3 protocol, and how these attacks can be detected using the deterministic version of the Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA) which is an Artificial Immune System (AIS)-based algorithm. To evaluate DCAs effectiveness, we generated a testing dataset, by implementing various attacks then executing them in a DNP3 smart grid environment. We present our results, showing that these attacks can be successfully detected using an architecture based on the DCA.