IEC 61850 Industrial Communication Standards under Test

IEC-61850, as part of the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC) Technical Committee 57 (TC57), defines an international and standardized methodology to design electric power automation substations. It specifies a common way of communicating and integrating heterogeneous systems based on multivendor Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs); these devices play a fundamental role in the control architecture of these electric power systems. IEDs are connected to Ethernet network and according to IEC-61850 their abstract data models have been mapped to the following communication protocols: MMS (Manufacturing Message Specification), GOOSE (Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event), SV (Sampled Values), and possible in the future Web Services. All of these protocols can run over TCP/IP networks, so they can be easily deployed and integrated with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) network; if this continuous integration on one hand provides economical and functional benefits for the companies, on the other hand it exposes the industrial infrastructure to the external existing cyber-attacks; so it is necessary to face with the changing threats and vulnerabilities of the entire cyber world. Within the OpenLab collaboration between CERN and Siemens, a test-bench has been developed specifically to evaluate the robustness of industrial equipment [1] (TRoIE). This paper describes the design and the implementation of the testing framework and in particular of that part used to evaluate the robustness of the IEC-61850 [2] previously mentioned protocols implementations.