City, University of London

City, University of London (CITY) is a world-class education and research institute, originally founded in 1894 and with historic ties to the City of London. It is a member of the University of London, a federal university made up of multiple institutions from across the capital. The university conducts innovative research whilst emphasising the role of business and supporting the development of professionals across five specialist schools: School of Arts and Social Sciences; School of Health Sciences; School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering; City Law School; and The Business School. These work with various multidisciplinary centres, such as the Institute for Cyber Security (ICS).

CITY is a leader in the field of cyber-security, combining academic innovation with commercial experience, and with strong ties to industry. Areas of expertise including the protection of critical national infrastructure, intrusion and anomaly detection, traffic analytics and predictive modelling, data privacy and information security, and cryptography. CITY has successfully contributed to many large-scale EU projects, including OPTIMUS, REDAlert, CYBERSURE, ASSERT4SOA, and TOREADOR. Meanwhile, the ICS brings together professionals from the different schools and from across academia and industry to tackle the emerging cyber-security issues facing tomorrow’s mega-cities.

CITY is providing analysis and predictive modelling of DDoS attacks against the smart grid, specifically against devices within the AMI infrastructure. Our models will combine statistical dynamical approaches with state-based systems to measure and forecast the possible scale and impact of DDoS attacks, with special consideration of the interdependencies within and between the IT and OT and how this may result in cascading issues. Working in collaboration with L7 Defense, we are developing the Impact Chain Framework to qualitatively describe disruption caused by DDoS, the DDoS Dynamical Model encapsulating the attack itself, and several compromise propagation models to quantitatively capture cascading impact.