Wattson is a research testbed that allows investigating and analyzing the effects of cyberattacks on power grids.

Project Website: https://wattson.it

Disclaimer

Wattson comes without any warranty or guarantees to function. Use at your own risk. Wattson can mess up you computer's network configuration if used incorrectly.

Wattson is intended to be used for research enhancing the security of power grids.

Cite

When you refer to Wattson in your publication, please cite our paper:

Comprehensively Analyzing the Impact of Cyberattacks on Power Grids

in 8th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy 2023 (Euro S&P).

https://wattson.it/cite

Installation

For better performance, we suggest using a bare-metal installation instead of a virtual machine.

As the operating system, please use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Other distributions might work, but you have to install dependencies yourself.

Install APT Dependencies

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade
sudo apt install python3-pip python3-venv git gcc make perl cmake
python3 -m venv wattson-venv
wattson-venv/bin/python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

Install Wattson

This automatically installs Wattson's system dependencies via APT and sets up FRRouting for correct use.
If you do not want this, skip the second step (python3 setup.py wattson). Then, you have to install the dependencies manually.

# Install PowerOwl
git clone https://github.com/fkie-cad/powerowl.git
wattson-venv/bin/python3 -m pip install -e ./powerowl

# Install Wattson
git clone https://github.com/fkie-cad/wattson
## Install Wattson's Simulation Dependencies (OVS, Routing, ...)
sudo wattson-venv/bin/python3 wattson/setup.py wattson
# Install Wattson's Python module
wattson-venv/bin/python3 -m pip install -e ./wattson

Usage

To start a basic simulation, run

sudo python3 -m wattson wattson/scenarios/powerowl_example

Contributing

Wattson is (internally) undergoing significant refactoring and this public repository does not contain all parts of Wattson due to ethical considerations.

This, for any problems or suggestions, please open a respective issue. If you can point out the changes to be made to fix your problem, feel free to do so as well.

Patches are then applied to our internal version of Wattson and mirrored back into this repository.

Acknowledgments

A special thank goes to Martin Unkel for his implementation of the C++-based Python bindings for the IEC104 protocol. The project is available at PyPi and on Github.