@article{wei_lu_wang_2018, title={On Characterizing Information Dissemination During City-Wide Cascading Failures in Smart Grid}, volume={12}, ISSN={["1937-9234"]}, DOI={10.1109/JSYST.2017.2763462}, abstractNote={Although the smart gird is expected to eliminate cascading failures with the help of real-time system monitoring and control, it is yet unknown whether its underlying communication network is fast and reliable enough to achieve this goal. In this paper, we take an in-depth study on this issue by addressing three specific questions: 1) what is the evolution process of information dissemination and fault propagation in the smart grid?; 2) how to quantify the impact of cascading failures?; and 3) what are the conditions that information dissemination becomes either a booster or an adversary in mitigating cascading failures? To answer these questions, we build an innovative framework, the cascading failure with communications framework, to consolidate both communication networks and power grids, and provide quantitative evaluation on the impact of cascading failures. By studying and observing the progress of cascading failures in two city-wide power grids, we find that information dissemination is not always the winner in the race against fault propagation. Particularly, while fast and reliable communications can help in mitigating the consequences of cascading failures, anomalies such as massage delays may weaken its capability. Moreover, severely under-achieved communications, counter-intuitively, can even exacerbate the consequence of cascading failures.}, number={4}, journal={IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL}, author={Wei, Mingkui and Lu, Zhuo and Wang, Wenye}, year={2018}, month={Dec}, pages={3404–3413} }
 @article{wei_wang_2016, title={Data-centric threats and their impacts to real-time communications in smart grid}, volume={104}, ISSN={["1872-7069"]}, DOI={10.1016/j.comnet.2016.05.003}, abstractNote={One of the most distinguished challenges in studying the aftermath of cyber attacks in smart grid lies in data-centric threats, which refer to cyber attacks aimed at gaining advantage or sabotage the infrastructure by manipulating the data exchanged in the underlying communication network. Even though such attacks are critical by itself in the information network, they will result in more serious impacts to the power grid. This is because for an information-centric network, distorted or delayed information undermines services and applications, in the case of a power grid, however, these data-centric attacks may result in unstable systems, which may further detrimentally impact the power supplies. In this paper, we study the impacts of data-centric attacks in the real-time communication network of smart gird, and further the consequences caused to the power grid. Our study provides insights to both smart grid security research and operation.}, journal={COMPUTER NETWORKS}, author={Wei, Mingkui and Wang, Wenye}, year={2016}, month={Jul}, pages={174–188} }
 @article{wei_lu_wang_2016, title={Dominoes with Communications: On Characterizing the Progress of Cascading Failures in Smart Grid}, ISSN={["1550-3607"]}, DOI={10.1109/icc.2016.7511048}, abstractNote={Cascading failures are one of the most devastating forces in power systems, which may be initially triggered by minor physical faults, then spread with Domino-like chain-effect, resulting in large-scale blackout. How to prevent cascading failures becomes imperative, as our daily lives heavily depend on stable and reliable power supply. The next-generation power system, namely Smart Grid, is envisioned to facilitate real-time and distributed control of critical power infrastructures, thus effectively forestalling cascading failures. Although cascading failures have been well investigated in the literature, most studies were confined only in the power operation domain with the assumption that communication is always perfect, which is, however, not true for today's communication networks, where traffic congestion and random delay happen. Therefore, an open question is how to characterize cascading failures in the communication-assisted smart grid? To this end, we take an in-depth inspection of cascading failures in smart grid and reveal the interactions between the power system and the communication network. Our results provide insights into the interactions between physical failure propagation and communication message dissemination. In addition, we show that while ideal communications can undoubtedly help prevent cascading failures, under-achieved communications (i.e., communications with severe delay) can, counter-intuitively, exacerbate cascading failures.}, journal={2016 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMMUNICATIONS (ICC)}, author={Wei, Mingkui and Lu, Zhuo and Wang, Wenye}, year={2016} }
 @article{wei_gong_wang_2015, title={Claim What You Need: A Text-Mining Approach on Android Permission Request Authorization}, ISSN={["2334-0983"]}, DOI={10.1109/glocom.2015.7417472}, abstractNote={Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems nowadays, whose popularity, however, also attracts even more crafty developers to develop malicious softwares, or malwares, to exploit illegitimate means for profit. As a basic countermeasure, Android enforces the permission request scheme, in which an application (App) is required to present to the user the system resources (permissions) it will access, and ask user's approval before installation. However, this approach has been proven ineffective as it delegates the whole responsibility of decision- making to the user, who usually lacks the professional knowledge to comprehend the interpretation of a permission. Alternatively, many current researches focus on identifying potential malwares based on attributes of individual Apps, such as inspecting their source code, which, unfortunately, fall in another extreme which tend to make the decision for the user. Nevertheless, from the user's perspective, a satisfactory solution should be an approach which assists users to make the decision of the App installation on their own, by providing them with lucid reasons and requiring minimum professional knowledge. Based on the observation that the description of an App is the most direct interface to communicate its functionality to the user, in this paper we are motivated to explore the relationship between the description and the requested permissions of an App, and further build a model to predict proper permissions based on its description. Our evaluation with Apps collected from the Google Play Market shows that our prediction can achieve as high as 87% accuracy. In this regard, provide a user has full understanding of the description of an App, our model can act as an effective reminder to the user if the App tries to stealthily request permissions that are inconsistent with its description, which is a major character commonly exploited by malwares.}, journal={2015 IEEE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE (GLOBECOM)}, author={Wei, Mingkui and Gong, Xi and Wang, Wenye}, year={2015} }
 @article{wei_wang_2015, title={Safety Can Be Dangerous: Secure Communications Impair Smart Grid Stability Under Emergencies}, ISSN={["2334-0983"]}, DOI={10.1109/glocom.2015.7417012}, abstractNote={Smart grid features real-time monitoring and control by integrating advanced communication networks into traditional power grids. This integration, however, makes smart grid vulnerable to cyber attacks, i.e., the anomalies caused by attackers in the communication network can affect ordinary operations of the power grid and result in severe physical damage. To protect smart grid from cyber attacks, many traditional countermeasures, such as message encryption, have been proposed to be directly migrated to fit this system. In this regard, the very first fundamental questions that need to be addressed are how to evaluate and compare the physical impacts of cyber attacks and countermeasures, and whether traditional cyber security countermeasures can result in satisfactory performance in smart grid. Motivated by these questions, we establish a small-scale smart grid prototype, and use both experiments and cross-domain simulations to evaluate and compare the reaction of the power system under cyber attacks, with and without the presence of traditional countermeasures. Our study reveals that traditional countermeasures can not be readily migrated to protect smart grid in particular, and shows that during system emergencies where prompt system reactions are critical, the extra latency caused by message encryption and decryption can result in more than 10 times in the magnitude of voltage collapse. Our work indicates that traditional countermeasures may not fit smart grid, the newly emerging cyber- physical system, which has strict time constraint. Therefore it is essential for researchers to seek solutions to address smart grid specific security threats.}, journal={2015 IEEE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE (GLOBECOM)}, author={Wei, Mingkui and Wang, Wenye}, year={2015} }
 @inproceedings{wei_wang_2014, title={Greenbench: A benchmark for observing power grid vulnerability under data-centric threats}, DOI={10.1109/infocom.2014.6848210}, abstractNote={Smart grid is a cyber-physical system which integrates communication networks into traditional power grid. This integration, however, makes the power grid susceptible to cyber attacks. One of the most distinguished challenges in studying the aftermath of cyber attacks in smart grid lies in data-centric threats. Even though such attacks are critical to the information network, they will result in much more Domino-like impact than they behave in cyber world. This is because for an information-centric network, distorted or delayed information undermines services and applications. But in power grid, these data-centric attacks may result in instable power systems, and further detrimental impact of power supplies. In this paper, we present Greenbench, a benchmark that is designed to evaluate real-time power grid dynamics in response to data-centric attacks. The simulation results provide several counter-intuitive suggestions to both smart grid security research and deployment.}, booktitle={2014 proceedings ieee infocom}, author={Wei, M. K. and Wang, Wenye}, year={2014}, pages={2625–2633} }