Cybersecurity Challenges and Emerging Protection Technologies in Modern Electrical Telecommunications Networks

Abstract

This study investigates the cybersecurity challenges confronting modern electrical telecommunication networks and evaluates the effectiveness of emerging protection technologies through an integrated  MATrix LABoratory (MATLAB) and Python simulation framework. A quantitative simulation-based approach was adopted to model a communication network comprising 100 interconnected nodes operating under cyberattack intensities ranging from 0% to 50%. Four categories of advanced cybersecurity mechanisms were implemented, namely an Artificial Intelligence-based Intrusion Detection System (AI-IDS), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), Blockchain Authentication, and Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA). Network and security performance were quantified using Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Packet Loss (PL), Throughput, End-to-End Delay (E2E Delay), Detection Accuracy (DA), Detection Rate (DR), False Positive Rate (FPR), Encryption Overhead (EO), and an Overall Security Index (OSI). Results show that increasing attack intensity produced a near-linear decline in PDR and throughput and a corresponding rise in PL and delay, confirming the destabilizing effect of cyber threats on communication reliability. Conversely, the deployment of the proposed protection technologies markedly improved intrusion detection capability, preserved data confidentiality and integrity, and sustained acceptable performance under hostile conditions. ZTA achieved the highest overall security score (98/100), while the AI-IDS maintained consistently high DA (above 82%) with a correspondingly low FPR.