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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

Project: Corbomite - Product: ConsoleWorks REACT

TDi Technologies presents ConsoleWorks REACT, an advanced platform designed to tackle the complexities of cyber and operational risk assessment. This comprehensive solution goes beyond asset-focused approaches by considering the impact of both assets and people have on the security and operation of critical infrastructure, specifically targeting preventing gird mis-operation by evaluating real-time human interaction or commands with critical assets. The hypothesis suggests that by integrating the assessment of user commands into the overall risk assessment process, organizations can make more informed decisions, prioritize resources effectively, and respond promptly to potential threats. This hypothesis forms the basis for the development of a proactive and holistic risk management approach that is more comprehensive and context aware than traditional models which only look at assets, patch levels, configuration and threat intel by collecting that information off the network vs directly from the asset, human, and human interaction all in real-time. ConsoleWorks' unique man-in-the-middle architecture is a key feature that sets it apart in the cybersecurity landscape. This architecture enables the real-time observation, enforcement, and commands or interaction risk transparency of user interaction with critical infrastructure to be risk mitigated and audited as they are aggregated with device and human risk factors for a more comprehensive risk threat score across a device or group of devices. This architecture allows ConsoleWorks to act as a secure intermediary between users and critical assets, monitoring all interactions and ensuring that only authorized commands are sent to the asset to be executed. This not only enhances security but also provides a comprehensive audit trail of all user activities, contributing to compliance efforts and facilitating incident investigation and risk management. By integrating this unique architecture with our comprehensive risk assessment methodology, ConsoleWorks REACT provides a powerful solution for managing cyber and operational risks, enabling organizations to maintain a robust security posture and effectively mitigate potential threats. To that end, the primary objective of this project was to research and develop a robust solution that enables the energy industry to mitigate the risks associated with human actions that can compromise the security or operations of assets critical to energy delivery, generation, transmission and operation. ConsoleWorks REACT plays a pivotal role in achieving this goal by leveraging its unique capabilities to monitor and track all user activity. Through its Zero Trust approach, which emphasizes continuous verification, the platform ensures secure access to assets and serves as the centralized human response and notification platform for addressing cyber and operational issues.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Building Cybersecurity Educational Materials for Students: The Windfarm Capture-The-Flag Exercise

Securing and protecting critical infrastructure in an increasingly digital world is vital but it is all too often an afterthought. It is especially important that students become aware of internet safety and security at an early age. However, the availability of interactive and educational cybersecurity material targeted toward students is minimal in the United States. Here we show an example of interactive cyber security educational material that an educator can use in their classroom to encourage students to think about the interaction between real-world physical objects, cyber security, and information security. By putting together a “capture-the-flag” exercise, students can see in real time how hackers and cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities and gain access information. The students try to “capture” the “flag” (i.e., information) in the wind farm by looking for oddities in the code or by taking advantage of weaknesses in everyday protocols. Students can also see how cybersecurity interacts with the power grid through the wind farm project scenario and how a hacker could cause serious problems to a critical infrastructure sector. Our goal for the project is getting students interested in cybersecurity and help them develop an awareness of how important having robust security systems is. We also hope that this project demonstrates the importance of introducing these concepts early and inspires others to create similar projects geared toward students.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Automation of Vulnerability and Patch Management: Information Extraction, Association, and Optimization

Vulnerability and patch management is an integral part of a robust cybersecurity program, yet it grows increasingly complex due to the sheer amount of data that must be analyzed. Particularly in Operational Technology (OT) environments, analysis must be done manually because of the lack of automated solutions. Additionally, there are many steps in this process, from the initial discovery of the vulnerability to the implementation of its remediation, and each step in the process requires different data in order to be performed effectively. In this work, we provide approaches and strategies to assist operators in industrial or OT environments throughout the vulnerability management cycle. Security advisories provide key information about mitigation strategies, or actions that can be taken when a patch is unavailable or cannot be installed. Details of these strategies are not shared in public vulnerability databases and must be found manually. We approach this problem by designing a solution to automatically identify that information within vendor security advisories and retrieve it for operator use. We start with an approach that requires domain-specific knowledge of certain frequently-seen reference websites. Next, an approach that can work on an arbitrary website but relies on certain keywords. Finally, an approach that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and does not require specific knowledge or keywords. Each of these approaches is more general than its predecessor; we demonstrate high accuracy for all approaches Advisories also often contain details of affected products in non-standard or natural language formats. While this information can be easily understood when read by an operator, the non-standard format acts as a barrier to effective automation. We provide an approach for the first step in this process: identifying vendors in security advisories and mapping them to a standard framework for representing digital assets and software products. We evaluate five established string similarity algorithms, plus one of our own design that combines string similarity and information theory, on the task of mapping vendors to their corresponding entries in the Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) repository. Our results show that our proposed metric outperforms all others. Due to the constraints on time, finances, and personnel for organizations, Large Language Models (LLMs) may seem like attractive opportunities for security operators to speed up information gathering; however, it is still not clear whether LLMs can handle vulnerability management tasks well. To answer this question, we perform an empirical study of LLMs’ ability to provide consistent, accurate information about vulnerabilities in order to guide organizations in their adoption of LLMs. We observe poor performance for all models tested, suggesting that these models are not well-suited to the consistent retrieval of accurate vulnerability information. Finally, once vulnerabilities have been identified and any additional information has been obtained, operators must decide which remediation actions to implement based on their available resources. This already-complex problem becomes even more so when we consider that a vulnerability may have multiple avenues for remediation. We formulate this scenario as two knapsack problems and provide solutions, which we then compare against several existing strategies for vulnerability prioritization seen in real operational environments.

McClanahan, Kylie↗
DOE OSTI2025

Cyber‐Resilient Distributed Energy Resource Control Algorithms for Smart Distribution Grids

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the development of cyber‐resilient gradient‐based optimisation algorithms and theoretical proof for grid‐interactive distributed energy resource (DER) control to enable two grid services of virtual power plants (VPPs) dispatch and grid voltage regulation, considering the communication and security impacts. Firstly, the combined DER dispatch and voltage regulation as a real‐time gradient‐based optimisation problem is recapped. Thereafter, we consider a probabilistic traffic model to characterise packet delays and loss in a communication network, and study how the delays enter the process of information exchange among the grid measurement units, local DER controllers and the grid control centre that execute this control algorithm in a coordinated manner. Then, a strategy combining delay thresholds and message update rules is proposed to immunity the asynchrony resulting from the communications traffic and it avoids possible numerical instabilities and sensitivities of the power tracking and voltage regulation capabilities, resulting as cyber‐resilient DER control algorithms. Additionally, their convergence is theoretically proved. Effectiveness of proposed cyber‐resilient algorithms has been validated on the IEEE 37‐bus system in terms of convergence, VPP tracking and voltage regulation performance for smart distribution systems with high penetration of DERs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Cybersecurity Assessment in DER-rich Distribution Operations: Criticality Levels and Impact Analysis

The integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in distribution networks has become a pivotal strategy for achieving decarbonization, enhancing grid resilience, and optimizing grid efficiency. Remote monitoring and control op- erations of such resources rely on a network of sensors and communication infrastructure, exposing the system to potential cyber threats. Therefore, as the deployment of DERs increases, ensuring secure monitoring and control becomes an imperative challenge. This paper utilizes real-time feeder models, which are instrumental in developing cybersecurity testbeds tailored for hardware-in-loop (HIL) systems. These models enable users to simulate cyber attacks in a real-world environment and analyze the power distribution operations during vulnerabilities. Furthermore, we discuss several practical sets of grid parameters to identify critical levels of DERs and evaluate various scenarios that simulate cyber threats on sensitive DERs. The modified IEEE 123-bus model is used as the test case for demonstrating the proposed scenarios. The findings from this study provide valuable insights into the vulnerabilities and potential consequences of cyber attacks on DERs, allowing for better mitigation strategies and improved cyber resilience in future distribution networks.

Maharjan, Manisha↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cyber Physical Grid-Interactive Distributed Energy Resources Control for VPP Dispatch and Regulation

This paper presents a cyber-physical algorithm for grid-interactive Distributed Energy Resource (DER) control to enable two features of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) dispatch and grid voltage regulation, considering the communication and security impacts. We first formulate the DER dispatch problem as a real-time, iterative, and grid-interactive DER control problem. Thereafter, we consider a probabilistic traffic model to characterize packet delays and loss in a communication network, and study how the delays enter the process of information exchange among the grid measurement units, local DER controllers and the grid control center that coordinately execute this dispatch algorithm. Finally, a strategy combining delay threshold and modified message update rules is proposed to immune the asynchrony resulting from the communications network traffic and it avoids possible numerical instabilities and sensitivities of the tracking and regulation capabilities of this DER control algorithm. By implementing the proposed cyber-physical algorithm on the modified IEEE 37-node system, our preliminary results exhibit that the uncertainties of the underlying communications infrastructure must be considered for the VPP tracking and regulation capabilities of any DER in a generic Cyber-Physical System (CPS), because the delayed voltage measurements in the uplink/bi-link cases result in the off-track in VPP dispatch and jittery in voltage regulation.

cyber-physical algorithm↗
DOE OSTI2020

An Interior-Point Solver for Optimal Power Flow Problem Considering Distributed FACTS Devices

In this paper, we propose an AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) model considering distributed flexible AC transmission system (D-FACTS) devices, in which the reactance of D-FACTS equipped lines are introduced as decision variables. This is motivated by increasing interests in using D-FACTS devices to address system operational and cyber-security concerns. First, D-FACTS devices can be incorporated in real-time operations for economic benefits such as managing power congestions and reducing system losses. Second, D-FACTS devices can be utilized by moving target defense (MTD), an emerging concept against cyber-attacks, to prevent attackers from knowing true system configurations. Therefore, system operators can use the proposed ACOPF model to achieve economic benefits and provide the setpoints of D-FACTS devices for MTD at the same time. In addition, we rigorously derive the gradient and Hessian matrices of the objective function and constraints, which are further used to build an interior-point solver of the proposed ACOPF. Numerical results on the IEEE 118-bus transmission system show the validity of the proposed ACOPF model as well as the efficacy of the interior-point solver in minimizing system losses and generation costs.

Liu, Bo↗
DOE OSTI2024

'I’m here because I want to make a difference.’

If you're at Los Alamos National Laboratory and happen to encounter Matt Johnson, don't be surprised if this busy leader smiles and stops to ask you how he can help. That’s the essence of the type of manager—and person—he is. As the leader of the Pit Technologies division at the Lab, Matt oversees six groups that cover national security manufacturing, operations and professional support. Matt started his career at the Lab in 2002. His first assignments included work with confinement vessels used at firing sites such as Nevada National Security Site. Matt's deep knowledge of high-strength steel made him a perfect fit for the research and fabrication of these explosive-proof containers. Shortly after joining the Lab, Matt accepted the position as the Welding and Joining team leader supporting national security manufacturing, the hydrotest program and welding efforts across the NNSA complex. Over time, Matt made his way across many programs at the Laboratory.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2024

EMP Testing of NAE Magnetic Motor Starters

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) performed a high-altitude nuclear electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) critical generation station component vulnerability test campaign with a focus on high-frequency, conducted early-time (E1) HEMP for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER). This report provides vulnerability test results to investigate component response and/or damage thresholds to reasonable HEMP threat levels that will help to inform site vulnerability assessments, mitigation planning, and modeling calibrations. This work details testing of North American Electric (NAE) magnetic motor starters to determine the effects of conducted HEMP environments. Motor starters are the control elements that provide power to motors throughout a generating plant; a starter going offline would cause loss of power to critical pumps and compressors, which could lead to component damage or unplanned plant outages. Additionally, failed starters would be unable to support plant startup. Six industrial motor starters were tested: two 2 horsepower (HP) starters with breaker disconnects and typical protection equipment, two 20 HP starters with breaker disconnects, and two 20 HP starters with fused disconnects. Each starter was placed in a circuit with a generator and inductive motor matching the starter rating. The conducted EMP insult was injected on the power cables passing through the motor starter, with separate tests for the generator and motor sides of the starter.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Ultra-Low Disorder Graphene Quantum Dot-Based Spin Qubits for Cyber Secure Fossil Energy Infrastructure (Final Technical Report)

The overarching goal of the proposed project is to demonstrate the feasibility of creating ultralow local disorder graphene quantum dots (GQDs)-based high-speed, high-fidelity spin quantum bits (qubits) for extremely cyber-secure coal energy plants of the future. Despite their inherent benefits, the coherence times in the state-of-the-art GQD qubits are still low primarily due to the local disorder in GQD devices generated during lithographic fabrication of GQDs. Hence, the focus of this research is to prepare ultralow disorder GQDs (e.g., edge roughness ~0.5nm) and evaluate the low temperature (~mK) charge/spin transport characteristics of the engineered GQD qubit platform. To achieve minimal disorder in GQD qubits, we employ a novel approach that combines nanotomy (novel GQD fabrication technique developed by the PI) and scanning probe microscopy-atomic oxidation lithography (SPM-AOL).

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Euro-Deterrent: Analysis of Proposals for a European Nuclear Arsenal (CNSIS Paper)

The idea of a “Euro-deterrent”—a nuclear arsenal under European control and mandated to protect multiple European countries—has been proposed many times as a means for European self-defense independent of United States security guarantees under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This paper examines not only the concept’s multiple guises, but the reasons for their failure. It will address the idea of a Franco-British umbrella, a French umbrella, a European “pool”, and the nuclear arsenal of a hypothetical “united Europe”. Reasons for rejection largely fall into three categories: sovereignty concerns, credibility gaps, and a desire to preserve existing norms and structures. This paper concludes that the Euro-deterrent will likely remain only hypothetical unless the US unequivocally signals its intent to withdraw its nuclear umbrella from Europe, thereby forcing European countries to build a new defense arrangement.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2021

Guided Resilience Self Assessment Application

Reliable electricity access is vital for everything from hospitals to national security. When grid disturbances occur, it is crucial to minimize the amount of time it takes to recover. Grid resiliency considers both the preparation for and recovery from high-impact low-frequency disturbances (HILF) such as weather events and cyber attacks. The Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) funds the multi-laboratory Microgrids, Infrastructure Resilience, and Advanced Control Launchpad (MIRACL) project to investigate technologies to support and grow distributed wind. Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) contribute to resilience and cybersecurity efforts for the project, and have produced a resilience framework to evaluate system resilience based on individual system specifications. In order to make this framework easy for anyone to apply, I have coded a web application that allows users to input their power system qualities, goals, and perceived risks and then receive suggestions on how to improve their grid resiliency. The web application follows the seven steps in the planning stage of the framework process, allowing the user to input information about their grid and select from common goals, metrics, and hazards, as well as add their own. The application currently provides information about how to complete each step, requiring minimal prior knowledge of the framework. Future work for this application will include allowing the user to submit line drawings of their system and incorporate modeling tools so that the hazard simulations of applying the framework is completed for the user.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cyber Physical Grid-Interactive Distributed Energy Resources Control for VPP Dispatch and Regulation: Preprint

This paper presents a cyber-physical algorithm for grid interactive DER control to enable two features of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) dispatch and grid voltage regulation, considering the communication and security impacts. We first formulate the DER dispatch problem as a real-time, iterative, and grid-interactive DER control problem. Thereafter, we consider a probabilistic traffic model to characterize packet delays and loss in a communication network, and study how the delays enter the process of information exchange among the grid measurement units, local DER controllers and the grid control center that coordinately execute this dispatch algorithm. Finally, we propose a cyber-physical grid-interactive DER control algorithm using the previous message strategy. The tracking and regulation capabilities of this proposed algorithm can be made immune to the asynchrony resulting from the communications network traffic. We carry out simulations to show possible numerical instabilities and sensitivities of the tracking and regulation capabilities on the proposed strategy. Our results exhibit that the uncertainties of the underlying communications infrastructure must be considered in the control algorithm for the VPP tracking and regulation capabilities of any DER in a generic Cyber-Physical System (CPS).

co-simulation↗
DOE OSTI2023

High Power Targetry R&D and support for future generation accelerator

A high-power target system is a key beam element to complete future High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. The target endures high power pulsed beam, leading to high cycle thermal stresses/pressures and thermal shocks. The increased beam power will also create significant challenges such as corrosion and radiation damage that can cause harmful effects on the material and degrade their mechanical and thermal properties during irradiation. This can eventually lead to the failure of the material and drastically reduce the lifetime of targets and beam intercepting devices. Designing a reliable target is already a challenge for MW class facilities today and has led several major accelerator facilities to operate at lower power due to target concerns. With present plans to increase beam power for next generation accelerator facilities in the next decade and the multi-year time-scale to acquire the knowledge on material behavior under such extreme environment, timely R&D of robust high-power targets is critical to fully secure the physics benefits of ambitious accelerator power upgrades. The next generation of high-power targets for future accelerators will use more complex geometries, novel materials, and new concepts allowing better high heat flux cooling methods. Advanced numerical simulations need to be developed to satisfy the physical design requirements of reliable beam-intercepting devices. In parallel, radiation hardened beam instrumentation irradiation methods for high-power targets must be further developed. Additional irradiation facilities are needed since only a few facilities worldwide offer beams for target testing, and the beam provided may not be appropriate for the specific facility or project. Thus, a comprehensive research and development program must be implemented to address the challenges that multi-MW targets face.

Pellemoine, F.↗
DOE OSTI2026

Controls Status of Fermilab's PIP-II Project

The Fermilab Proton Improvement Project II (PIP-II) is building a new Super Conducting Linear Accelerator (SCL) accelerating protons to 800 MeV for injection into the rest of the FNAL beam complex. Key progress since the last status report given at ICALEPCS includes the adoption of modern DevOps practices with continuous integration and GitOps-based deployments, commissioning of EPICS-based systems at the Cryomodule Test Facility, and integration of a Virtual Accelerator framework for application development ahead of installation. In parallel, web-based applications using Dart and Flutter have matured, providing secure, unified access to both EPICS and legacy ACNET data. Data acquisition and timing systems have also evolved. This paper presents the current state of controls, emphasizing these recent developments and outlining upcoming milestones as PIP-II approaches commissioning of its cryoplant in 2026 and the Warm Front End in 2027.

Crisp, D. B. [Fermilab]↗
DOE OSTI2021

A Taxonomic Classification Approach for Global Spatio-temporal Data

The World Bank, World Health Organization, and other major vendors collectively provide thousands of global time series datasets that focus on issues of the environment, public health, economics, violence, education, and national security. Sorting these data into meaningful information requires the use of data mining techniques to cluster trends into an orderly and manageable number of cases. The World SpatioTemporal Analytics and Mapping (WSTAMP) project database (wstamp.ornl.gov) was developed to spatiotemporally harmonize global vendor data (23,300+ attributes, 200+ locations, 50+ years). Within the WSTAMP analytical environment, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) has been a highly effective data-driven approach for clustering and mapping these time series into national spatiotemporal behavior maps. Two significant properties have surfaced from this work. First, several recognizable cluster patterns have emerged and persist across a range of locations, attributes, and time frames (e.g., increasing, decreasing, rebounding, peak, oscillating). Secondly, practitioners engaging WSTAMP have noted the explanatory and anticipatory value of these patterns and articulated particular interest in detecting them within the spatiotemporal cube. This need was addressed by shifting DTW-based clustering from an open ended, data-driven implementation to a taxonomic pattern matching approach. This paper presents the method including implementation strategies for visualization and human computer interaction and applies the approach to a sample data set and concludes with next steps.

Stewart, Robert↗
DOE OSTI2025

Enhancing Time Synchronization in Smart Grid With White Rabbit: Theory, Architecture, and Challenges

The smart grid aims to provide economically efficient and sustainable power to consumers with high quality and security. However, the increasing integration of distributed renewable energy sources presents challenges for smart grid protection and control systems. Here, to enhance smart grid operations, this article introduces White Rabbit (WR) as a more precise and accurate time synchronization technique. To explore White Rabbit’s potential applications in the smart grid, this study first explains existing time synchronization techniques and their limitations, followed by an analysis of the role and importance of time synchronization in smart grids. A comprehensive survey is then conducted, covering the theories, principles, implementations, performances, and existing application cases of White Rabbit. The findings suggest that White Rabbit is a promising technique for smart grid deployment. However, several challenges remain on the path to large-scale implementation. These challenges are analyzed in detail, highlighting key areas for future research.

Liu, Yu [University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (U↗