Adewumi Adeloye Dissertation Proposal Defense, Monday, December 1, 2025 @ 3:30 pm Central Time

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Annamalai Annamalai

TITLE: SECURE SHELL AS A CYBER-PHYSICAL SHIELD: DETECTING AND MITIGATING DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACKS IN SMART POWER GRID

ABSTRACT: The increasing integration of digital communication and control networks within the electric power grid has introduced unprecedented efficiency—yet simultaneously expanded the attack surface for cyber-physical disruptions. This dissertation investigates the use of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol as a resilient, real-time cyber-physical shield capable of detecting and mitigating Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks within smart-grid supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) environments. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experimental framework was developed using the Lucas-Nülle Smart-Grid Trainer, Siemens Scalance S615 security router, and Sentron PAC 4200 power-quality meter to emulate authentic grid operations under controlled attack conditions. Two dominant DoS topologies—SSH brute-force authentication exhaustion and TCP SYN flooding—were executed to evaluate their impacts on both cyber metrics (latency, CPU utilization, packet retransmission) and physical network parameters (voltage stability, current distortion, and real/reactive power deviation). The findings confirmed a quantifiable cyber-to-physical propagation effect: network congestion and session flooding induced measurable voltage fluctuations and transient imbalance across the grid model. When mitigation mechanisms were introduced—specifically SSH key-based authentication and redundant VPN-over-SSH tunneling—system resilience improved markedly. Unauthorized session success rates declined by over 95%, while end-to-end control-channel stability and data integrity improved by 92–97%, validating the dual defensive role of SSH as both an encryption layer and an operational shield. This research contributes a replicable methodology for cyber-physical experimentation, a quantitative model linking SSH-level anomalies to grid-performance indicators, and a layered mitigation architecture aligning with NERC CIP, IEEE 2030, and IEC 62351 cybersecurity standards. The outcomes demonstrate that SSH—when systematically engineered—can evolve from a conventional access protocol into a proactive, adaptive defense mechanism for critical power-system infrastructures. Beyond its technical contributions, this work provides a foundation for future integration of AI-driven SSH anomaly detection, zero-trust authentication frameworks, and multi-vector resilience modeling within smart-grid operations. It ultimately envisions a secure, intelligent, and self-healing cyber-physical ecosystem where operational reliability and cybersecurity coexist as unified design imperatives.

Keywords: Cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, smart power microgrid systems

Room Location: Electrical Engineering Building Room 315D