Smart grid cybersecurity and resilience
What happens to a power grid when the computers and networks that run it are attacked, and how does it get back?
Modern distribution and transmission systems are steered by measurements that travel over networks. That makes the measurement path itself an attack surface: corrupt what the operator sees and you corrupt what the operator does. The center studies the whole loop, from the meter to the control room and back out to the breaker.
What the group builds
Detecting false data before it reaches control
Smart meters and phasor measurement units can be spoofed. The group builds detectors, both centralized and federated across sites, that flag injected measurements without needing to pool raw data from every utility.
Observability-aware communication design
Where PMUs sit and how their traffic is routed determines whether the state estimator can still see the grid after a failure. The group co-designs sensor placement and network topology rather than treating them as separate problems.
Joint power and communication restoration
After a storm or an attack, the power layer and the communication layer have to come back together: a crew cannot reconfigure what it cannot observe. The group formulates restoration as one problem across both layers, including networked microgrid formation.
Experiments on real hardware
Claims about resilience are only as good as the testbed behind them. SUMMIT couples RTDS real-time simulation with actual controllers, relays, and network equipment across three universities.
Recent papers
The newest work from the faculty on this thrust. 71 papers since 2019 carry one of their names.
- A. Rezaee, F. Arpanaei, R. McCann, H. Rabbani, J. A. Hernández, M. Brandt-Pearce, V. M. VokkaraneIEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 10, Oct. 2026IF 4.0 (2023)
- A. Rezaee, R. McCann, V. M. VokkaraneIEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. D90-D105, Sept. 2026 (Special Issue on Benchmarking in Optical Networks)IF 4.0 (2023)
- A. Rezaee, F. Arpanaei, R. McCann, L. Nadal, J. A. Hernández, V. M. VokkaraneIEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 8, pp. C160-C172, Aug. 2026IF 4.0 (2023)
- L. Tseng3rd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Quantum Networks and Distributed Quantum Computing (QuNet), ACM SIGCOMM 2026, pp. 32-34, Aug. 2026
- L. Tseng, K. Neupane, L. Ambarapu, M. AloqailyCluster Computing, vol. 29, no. 5, June 2026IF 3.6 (2023)
- H. Rabbani, A. Rezaee, H. Rabbani, V. M. Vokkarane, M. Brandt-PearceIEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), pp. 1-5, June 2026
- L. Tseng, N. Yazdani-MotlaghACM Sustainability Week 2026, pp. 139-143, June 2026
- M. Z. Islam, Y. Lin, V. M. VokkaraneIEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 3459-3471, Mar. 2026IF 4.2 (2023)
Other thrusts
Most projects cut across two or three of them.