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Vol. 1 · Ed. 2026
CyberGlossary
Entry № 570

IEC 61850

Was ist IEC 61850?

IEC 61850An international standard for communications inside electrical substations, covering object-oriented data models (LNs), high-speed messaging (GOOSE), sampled-values measurements (SV), and MMS-based client/server traffic.


IEC 61850 is the international standard family for communications in electrical substation automation, first published in 2003 and now the dominant protocol stack in modern substations. It specifies an object-oriented data model — Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) expose Logical Nodes (LNs) such as PIOC (overcurrent protection), XCBR (circuit breaker), MMXU (measurements) — independent of the underlying transport. On the wire it defines three communication services: MMS-based client/server traffic (e.g. SCADA reads), GOOSE multicast peer-to-peer messages used for time-critical protection signaling (trip commands within milliseconds), and Sampled Values (SV) for digital instrument transformer measurements. IEC 61850 typically runs on dedicated process and station Ethernet networks inside a substation, with the corresponding IEC 62351 standard adding authentication, integrity, and (more rarely) encryption. Security concerns include unauthenticated GOOSE/SV by default, denial of service against the protection bus, malicious IED firmware, and inadequate segmentation between the substation LAN and corporate IT. Compromise of IEC 61850 traffic is the engineering primitive behind the 2016 Industroyer attack and remains a primary OT threat model for utilities.

Beispiele

  1. 01

    A substation deploys IEC 62351-secured GOOSE so that an injected GOOSE trip message from a malicious host on the process bus is rejected by IEDs.

  2. 02

    An OT NDR baselines normal MMS traffic from a substation gateway and alerts when a non-engineering host begins issuing IEC 61850 control writes.

Häufige Fragen

Was ist IEC 61850?

An international standard for communications inside electrical substations, covering object-oriented data models (LNs), high-speed messaging (GOOSE), sampled-values measurements (SV), and MMS-based client/server traffic. Es gehört zur Kategorie OT / ICS / IoT der Cybersicherheit.

Was bedeutet IEC 61850?

An international standard for communications inside electrical substations, covering object-oriented data models (LNs), high-speed messaging (GOOSE), sampled-values measurements (SV), and MMS-based client/server traffic.

Wie funktioniert IEC 61850?

IEC 61850 is the international standard family for communications in electrical substation automation, first published in 2003 and now the dominant protocol stack in modern substations. It specifies an object-oriented data model — Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) expose Logical Nodes (LNs) such as PIOC (overcurrent protection), XCBR (circuit breaker), MMXU (measurements) — independent of the underlying transport. On the wire it defines three communication services: MMS-based client/server traffic (e.g. SCADA reads), GOOSE multicast peer-to-peer messages used for time-critical protection signaling (trip commands within milliseconds), and Sampled Values (SV) for digital instrument transformer measurements. IEC 61850 typically runs on dedicated process and station Ethernet networks inside a substation, with the corresponding IEC 62351 standard adding authentication, integrity, and (more rarely) encryption. Security concerns include unauthenticated GOOSE/SV by default, denial of service against the protection bus, malicious IED firmware, and inadequate segmentation between the substation LAN and corporate IT. Compromise of IEC 61850 traffic is the engineering primitive behind the 2016 Industroyer attack and remains a primary OT threat model for utilities.

Wie schützt man sich gegen IEC 61850?

Schutzmaßnahmen gegen IEC 61850 kombinieren typischerweise technische Kontrollen und operative Praktiken, wie in der Definition oben beschrieben.

Welche anderen Bezeichnungen gibt es für IEC 61850?

Übliche alternative Bezeichnungen: IEC 61850 substation, GOOSE / MMS / SV.

Verwandte Begriffe