resilience

The 2025 Iberian Blackout: Anatomy of a Grid Collapse

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B9 L2 R2322

This talk provides a data-informed timeline of the April 28 Iberian blackout, examining how system conditions and possible instabilities may have shaped the cascade of events.

Leveraging Power Systems’ Modularity to support Resiliency Against Synthetic Cyber Disasters

Dr. Salam Baniahmed, Technical Manager, Veloce Energy

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B1 L4 R4214

The fact of power systems’ criticality to national security mandates continuous attention to the worst-case disruption scenarios. In a cyber world, grid modernization efforts have been hindered by cyber-related concerns. This webinar sheds some light on resiliency achievement by utilizing the modular cyber-physical nature of power systems, from an electron in a battery to a digital bit in the internet abyss.

Assessing DNS Resilience and Robustness

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B4 L5 R5220.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a core protocol for the Internet. It resolves mappings between Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and their corresponding Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs). Since all Internet communications rely on it, DNS structuring should therefore be resilient and robust against failure to avoid any service interruption. While the research community and experienced practitioners have established best practices to this end, many worldwide DNS implementations are still prone to many types of configuration errors. In this talk, I discuss the adoption of these approaches in some countries. Also, a case study is presented considering domains in Saudi Arabia (.sa) that illustrates the value of measuring the DNS at this scale. The results are valuable to improve the DNS infrastructure in the kingdom. Lastly, I provide recommendations to improve DNS service resilience and robustness.

RC3 Advisory Board Distinguished Lectures Workshop

RC3 Advisory Board

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B5 L5 R5220

Machine learning (ML) has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, demonstrating its effectiveness in a wide array of applications, including intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, when operating in adversarial environments, ML-based systems are susceptible to a range of attacks.

Three papers accepted to SmartGridComm 2021

1 min read ·
Three papers accepted to SmartGridComm 2021. 1) " CHIMERA: A Hybrid Estimation Approach to Limit the Effects of False Data Injection Attacks on Electric Power Grid" in collaboration with Yier Jin's group from University of Florida. 2) " Cyber-Physical Disaster Response of Power Supply Using Centralised-to-Distributed Framework" in collaboration with Fei Teng's group from Imperial College London. 3) " Attack Detection and Localization in Smart Grid with Image-based Deep Learning" in collaboration with Mostafa Mohammadpourfard's group from Istanbul Technical University.

Prior Information Makes Power Grids More Resilient

1 min read ·
The power grid infrastructure is a large-scale, heterogeneous, and complex cyber-physical system which forms the lifeline of modern societies. The trend of tight coupling of physics, communication and computation in cyber-physical energy systems (CPES) is evident by the inclusion of numerous measurement sensors. This contributes to enhancing the monitoring and control functionalities of CPES. At the same time, the occurrence of adverse effects constitutes a vital dimension of CPES operation. Increasing the resilience of critical energy systems of key importance for safeguarding the national

KAUST SENTRY team wins 2021 Cybersecurity Games & Conference Embedded Security Challenge

1 min read ·
The SENTRY Lab team wins the 18th annual CSAW Cybersecurity Games & Conference’s (CSAW '21) Embedded Security Challenge (ESC).

Blocking microgrid cyberattacks to keep the power flowing

1 min read ·
Power grids have become far more complex in recent decades due to energy demands, environmental regulations and small-scale renewable energy systems that turn businesses and individuals into combined consumer-producers. One way to ensure that power supplies remain resilient is to create small groups of sources and loads called microgrids. Microgrids can operate independently of the main grid when required, such as supporting hospitals during natural disasters, for example. As microgrids grow more complex, they require sophisticated computer networks to coordinate, control and distribute

Ines Pinto Gouveia

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cyber Security and Resilience Technology
Working towards building safe, secure and resilient systems.

Ali Shoker

Research Associate Professor, Computer Science
Ali Shoker, a Research Associate Professor at KAUST leading the Cyber Security and Resilience Technology lab. His research is focused on Applied Cyber Security and Resilience for real-world applications including SOC (SIEM, SOAR, XDR, IDS, IPS), Trustworthy AI, satellite systems, autonomous vehicles, fintech, Blockchain, RF Resilience, etc.