InfoSec Seminar – February 2026: Enhancing the Cyber Resilience of DER-based Smart Grid
https://meet.google.com/anu-wmtz-jcb
February 11, 2026 12:00 pm - February 11, 2026 1:00 pm
The Information Systems Security and Assurance Management (ISSAM) Department in Mihalcheon School of Management proudly invites you to the monthly InfoSec Seminar. The seminar series is open to anyone who is interested in security research and technologies, not only to Concordia University of Edmonton (CUE) members.
Date and Time: Wednesday February 11th, 2026 @ 12:00 – 1:00 MT (Edmonton, AB time)
Meeting Link: https://meet.google.com/anu-wmtz-jcb
Speaker:
Mengxiang Liu, Ph.D.
Mengxiang Liu received the B.Sc. degree in Automation from Tongji University, Shanghai, in 2017 and the Ph.D. degree in Cyberspace Security from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, in 2022. From 2023 to 2024, he was a Research Associate in Power Systems Engineering with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. From 2024 to 2025, he was a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK. He is currently a Lecturer with the School of Computer Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. His research interests include smart grid, cyber-physical security and resilience, and cyber-physical co-simulation.
Talk Description
Enhancing the Cyber Resilience of DER-based Smart Grid
The smart grid is undergoing rapid energy transition to integrate high-penetration renewable generation resources. To manage the large number of digitally connected distributed energy resources (DERs) in this transition, advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) are widely adopted. However, the resulting convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) expands potential attack surfaces, thereby elevating cybersecurity risks. Towards this end, this talk focuses on enhancing the cyber resilience of DER-based smart grid and proposes a cyber-resilience-enhancement framework by integrating both cyber and physical efforts. In the context of cyber-physical microgrids, this talk introduces proactive attack detection and impact mitigation methods against false data injection (FDI) attacks by strategically embedding perturbations into control layers. Specifically, it elaborates three perturbation schemes—control gain alteration, additive watermarking, and matrix coding—along with analytical analyses of control and detection performance, and the design of optimal perturbation strength. Furthermore, the talk establishes detection-triggered impact mitigation methods, which recursively estimate the injected bias from detection residuals to counteract attack impacts. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated using real-time cyber-physical co-simulation testbeds.
Contact. If you have any questions regarding the seminar series, please contact Shawn Thompson or Eslam G. AbdAllah, MISSM, Mihalcheon School of Management at shawn.thompson@concordia.ab.ca, eslam.abdallah@concordia.ab.ca