GridSecSim: A Hardware-in-the-Loop Co-simulation Platform for Intrusion Detection in Smart Grids
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The convergence of physical and cyber domains in smart grids exposes Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to sophisticated cyberattacks such as False Data Injection (FDI), Denial-of-Service (DoS), message replay, and identity spoofing. Existing evaluation platforms address this poorly: purely software-based solutions ignore real hardware constraints, while hybrid platforms rarely embed a native intrusion detection system. This paper presents GridSecSim, a low-cost hybrid Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) co-simulation platform coupling GridLAB-D (IEEE 13-Node) and NS-3 with three Raspberry Pi nodes that reproduce the roles of a residential AMI deployment. Its Sentinel IDS runs in real time on a Raspberry Pi 2 and combines five layers. Over a continuous 24-hour co-simulation with six representative attack scenarios, Sentinel reaches a precision of 99.1 %, a recall of 100 %, and an F1-score of 99.6 % (detection rate 6/6, zero false negatives), demonstrating the operational feasibility of the approach on constrained embedded hardware.
Source: Procedia Computer Science
Authors: Ndiaga Thioub, Mehdi Adda
Institution: Université du Québec à Rimouski
Language: English
Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7214372997