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At least 343 records · Page 19

Analysis of Design Constraints and System Impact of DER Cryptographic Module

In designing a security module for inverter communications in a DER environment, it is critical to consider the impact of the additional security on the environment as well as what types of security is required for the various messages that must pass from the inverter to and from a utility. Also, since cyber security is more than just preventing an unauthorized user from viewing data, mechanisms for proving identity and ensuring that data cannot be altered without such a modification being discovered are needed. This is where the security principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability come into play. For different types of communications, these different security principles may be important or not needed at all. Furthermore, the cost and constraints for applying cryptography for securing DER communications must be considered to help determine what is feasible within this environment and what will be the impact and cost of applying common cryptographic protections to inverter communications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Analysis of Design Constraints and System Impact of DER Cryptographic Module

In designing a security module for inverter communications in a DER environment, it is critical to consider the impact of the additional security on the environment as well as what types of security is required for the various messages that must pass from the inverter to and from a utility. Also, since cyber security is more than just preventing an unauthorized user from viewing data, mechanisms for proving identity and ensuring that data cannot be altered without such a modification being discovered are needed. This is where the security principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability come into play. For different types of communications, these different security principles may be important or not needed at all. Furthermore, the cost and constraints for applying cryptography for securing DER communications must be considered to help determine what is feasible within this environment and what will be the impact and cost of applying common cryptographic protections to inverter communications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Cyber Threat Assessment of Uplink and Commanding System for Mission Operation

Most of today's Mission Operations Systems (MOS) rely on Ground Data System (GDS) segment to mitigate cyber security risks. Unfortunately, IT security design is done separately from the design of GDS' mission operational capabilities. This incoherent practice leaves many security vulnerabilities in the system without any notice. This paper describes a new way to system engineering MOS, to include cyber threat risk assessments throughout the MOS development cycle, without this, it is impossible to design a dependable and reliable MOS to meet today's rapid changing cyber threat environment.

ground data↗

R&D100: IC ID

Supply chain security to detect, deter, and prevent the counterfeiting of networked and stand-alone integrated circuits (ICs) is critical to cyber security. Sandia National Laboratory researchers have developed IC ID to leverage Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and strong cryptographic authentication to create a unique fingerprint for each integrated circuit. IC ID assures the authenticity of ICs to prevent tampering or malicious substitution.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

What is the current state of the science of Cyber defense?

My overall sense of the cyber defense field is one of an adolescent discipline currently bogged down in a cloud of issues, the most iconic of which is the great diversity of approaches that are being aggregated to form a coherent field. Because my own expertise is complex systems and materials physics research, I have limited direct experience in cyber security sciences except as a user of secure networks and computing resources. However, in producing this report, I have found with certainty that there exists no calculus for cyber risk assessment, mitigation, and response, although some hopeful precepts toward this end are emerging.

Computer Science↗

Energy Resilience for Mission Assurance: Agile Co-simulation for Cyber Energy System Security (ACCESS), Model Advancements for Resilience Analysis

Agile Co-simulation for Cyber Energy System Security (ACCESS) is a co-simulation platform developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The primary high-level use-case for ACCESS is to study existing or new cyber-physical critical infrastructure systems, with a heavy emphasis on 1) systems that utilize communication networks, and 2) studies that seek to understand cyber-related system impacts. ACCESS is currently used for several energy system resilience projects at LLNL. In the Energy Resilience for Mission Assurance (ERMA) project, ACCESS is used in the Modeling for Metric Calculation task (specifically, subtask 4.3, Communications and Cyber Modeling) to model and simulate the cyber and communication system aspects of Defense Critical Electric Infrastructure (DCEI) systems, with a focus on computing specific communication system metrics that can impact system resilience and mission performance. Simulated communication system performance will be fed back to other ERMA system components so that mission performance can be evaluated holistically. This report describes several enhancements to the ACCESS platform that were implemented during the execution of the ERMA project in support of reslience analysis. This includes the addition of new models and subsystems, enhancements to existing models, and integration with external systems. The remainder of this report is structured as follows. In Section 2, a brief background description of the ACCESS platform is provided, including an outline of ACCESS components, example usecases, and a set of communication network resilience metrics that can be computed with ACCESS. Section 3 describes the ACCESS model enhancements for ERMA in detail. Finally, Section 4 briefly outlines future integration opportunities between ACCESS and project participant capabilities identified during the progression of the project.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Enabling Cybersecurity, Situational Awareness and Resilience in Distribution Grids with High Penetration of Photovoltaics (CARE-PV) (Final Report)

Since legacy distribution systems have very limited visibility beyond the substation, high penetration of PV at the grid edge presents some unique operational challenges. One approach to address these challenges is to use information from advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and µPMUs. However, exploiting this information is impacted by a number of factors, including multi-timescale measurements, volume of data generated, communication network impairments (e.g., information loss and latency) and susceptibility to cyber-attacks. Therefore, one of the critical tasks involved in the management of a distribution grid is to develop complete situational awareness by integrating cyber-security mechanisms with state estimation strategies and leveraging this situational awareness to assure energy services at strategic locations while exploiting AMI/PV inverter/ µPMU data. This CARE-PV project addresses the fundamental challenges in situational awareness and resilience to cyber and physical vectors by exploiting the synergy between innovative modeling, estimation, data analytics, testing and validation using smart PV inverters designed at K-State and facilities at NREL. Specifically, the project involved the development, testing and validation of the following novel enabling technologies: (Thrust 1) Resilience to cyber vectors that impact data integrity was addressed via a two-level defense strategy that combines cyber intrusion detection using self-learning, cooperative smart PV inverters, and a novel moving target defense framework to combat data integrity attacks. (Thrust 2) Resilience to cyber-physical vectors that impact situational awareness by limiting data availability was addressed via novel centralized and decentralized, sparsity-based static and dynamic state estimation approaches that enhance observability even when the underlying system is unobservable. (Thrust 3) Leveraging a unique probabilistic sensitivity analysis approach accompanied by one-of-a-kind dominant influencer set computation, the vulnerability of critical infrastructure at strategic locations was evaluated so that proactive PV-based control strategies can be used to support operations under normal/outage scenarios. These CARE-PV project innovations were demonstrated on both small-scale IEEE and larger utility-scale testbeds (Thrust 4). Feedback from Industry Advisory Board members was used to formulate a commercialization pathway for a subset of CARE-PV technologies. These CARE-PV technologies will ultimately lead to reliable and secure, large-scale integration of renewable energy and mitigate the risk of energy disruption resulting from cyber incidents and other emerging threats within the energy environment.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Cyberspace modernization. An interest protocol planning advisory

A common challenge across the communications and information technology (IT) sectors is Internet + modernization + complexity + risk + cost. Cyberspace modernization and cyber security risks, issues, and concerns impact service providers, their customers, and the industry at large. Public and private sectors are struggling to solve the problem. New service opportunities lie in mobile voice, video, and data, and machine-to-machine (M2M) information and communication technologies that are migrating not only to predominant Internet Protocol (IP) communications, but also concurrently integrating IP, version 4 (IPv4) and IP, version 6 (IPv6). With reference to the Second Internet and the Internet of Things, next generation information services portend business survivability in the changing global market. The planning, architecture, and design information herein is intended to increase infrastructure preparedness, security, interoperability, resilience, and trust in the midst of such unprecedented change and opportunity. This document is a product of Sandia National Laboratories Tribal Cyber and IPv6 project work. It is a Cyberspace Modernization objective advisory in support of bridging the digital divide through strategic partnership and an informed path forward.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An Advanced Cyber-Physical System Security Testbed for Substation Automation

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) testbed serves as a powerful platform for testing and validating cyber intrusion detection and mitigation strategies in substations. This study presents the design and development of a CPS testbed that can effectively assess the real-time dynamics of a substation. Cyber attacks exploiting IEC 61850-based SV and GOOSE protocols are demonstrated using the testbed, along with an analysis on attack detection. Realistic timing measurements are obtained, and the time frames for deploying detection and mitigation strategies are evaluated.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Adaptive Hierarchical Cyber Attack Detection and Localization in Active Distribution Systems

Development of a cyber security strategy for the active distribution systems is challenging due to the inclusion of distributed renewable energy generations. Here this paper proposes an adaptive hierarchical cyber attack detection and localization framework for distributed active distribution systems via analyzing electrical waveforms. Cyber attack detection is based on a sequential deep learning model, via which even minor cyber attacks can be identified. The two-stage cyber attack localization algorithm first estimates the cyber attack sub-region, and then localize the specified cyber attack within the estimated subregion. We propose a modified spectral clustering-based network partitioning method for the hierarchical cyber attack ‘coarse’ localization. Next, to further narrow down the cyber attack location, a normalized impact score based on waveform statistical metrics is proposed to obtain a ‘fine’ cyber attack location by characterizing different waveform properties. Finally, compared with classical and state-of-art methods, a comprehensive quantitative evaluation with two case studies shows promising estimation results of the proposed framework.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Evaluation of Apex Alpha with LabWare-LIMS Data Reduction for Alpha Analyses

Savannah River Site's Environmental Bioassay Laboratory is migrating its laboratory information management system (LIMS) from SQL-LIMS to Oracle Labware-LIMS (LW-LIMS) systems to align with the Department of Energy's cyber security policies. Concurrently with the LIMS upgrade, the current VMS based Alpha Measurement System (AMS) software is being replaced with Apex Alpha software to reduce other cyber vulnerabilities, streamline procedural production aspects of data handling, and improve outdated reduction processes to align the program with requirements outlined in ANSI N13.30. The primary technical changes which are being implemented are: - Reagent contributions are added in data reduction, - Moving average background equivalent activity are used for gross signal corrections, - Measured uncertainty of both are included in the decision level and propagated uncertainty, - Tracer levels are increased for precision and accuracy improvements, and - Reports are modified for compliance.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Situ: Identifying and Explaining Suspicious Behavior in Networks

Despite the best efforts of cyber security analysts, networked computing assets are routinely compromised, resulting in the loss of intellectual property, the disclosure of state secrets, and major financial damages. Anomaly detection methods are beneficial for detecting new types of attacks and abnormal network activity, but such algorithms can be difficult to understand and trust. Network operators and cyber analysts need fast and scalable tools to help identify suspicious behavior that bypasses automated security systems, but operators do not want another automated tool with algorithms they do not trust. Experts need tools to augment their own domain expertise and to provide a contextual understanding of suspicious behavior to help them make decisions. In this paper we present Situ, a visual analytics system for discovering suspicious behavior in streaming network data. Situ provides a scalable solution that combines anomaly detection with information visualization. The system's visualizations enable operators to identify and investigate the most anomalous events and IP addresses, and the tool provides context to help operators understand why they are anomalous. Finally, operators need tools that can be integrated into their workflow and with their existing tools. This paper describes the Situ platform and its deployment in an operational network setting. Furthermore, we discuss how operators are currently using the tool in a large organization's security operations center and present the results of expert reviews with professionals.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Cincinnatus: Domain-Independent Breach Detection System

Cincinnatus enables detection of changes in binary data, which may be attributed to anomalies, security breaches, record changes, fraud, etc., without requiring experts to craft the models for analytics as well as the pipelines for collecting new samples, in the case of cyber security memory forensics data.

Smith, Jared M↗

Data Security Defense: Modeling and Detection of Synchrophasor Data Spoofing Attack for Grid Edge

Data security and cyberattack have become critical issues in the distributed power system where adversaries can swap the source information of sensors or even spoof and alter measurements. However, the cyber security of the power system is challenged by the unpredictability and stealth of the spoofing attacks. Here, to protect the data security at the grid edge, this paper developed a synchrophasor data spoofing attack detection framework based on the time-frequency feature extraction techniques including the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and object detection network for real-time synchrophasor data categorization and spoofing attack localization. The proposed approach outperforms earlier work in terms of spoofing attack detection and offers a vital localization function employing distributed synchrophasor sensors.

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Cyber-Informed Engineering

A continuing challenge for engineers who utilize digital systems is to understand the impact of cyber-attacks across the entire product and program lifecycle. This is a challenge due to the evolving nature of cyber threats that may impact the design, development, deployment, and operational phases of all systems. Cyber Informed Engineering is the process by which engineers are made aware of both how to use their engineering knowledge to positively impact the cyber security in the processes by which they architect and design components and the services and security of the components themselves.

42 ENGINEERING↗

System Administrator Training Item #25928

External and internal cyber-attacks pose an extreme risk to government, businesses and individuals. System attacks, resulting in compromised information are occurring more frequently and the threat to the Laboratory has never been higher. This training has been developed to help you better understand your role as a System Administrator and recognize your responsibilities within the Laboratory’s Information Security (Cyber) Program and has been revised to address newly implemented ACD 470.6 restrictions for mobile devices in secure areas.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Power system effects and mitigation recommendations for DER cyberattacks

Extensive deployment of interoperable distributed energy resources (DER) is increasing the power system cyber security attack surface. National and jurisdictional interconnection standards require DER to include a range of autonomous and commanded grid‐support functions, which can drastically influence power quality, voltage, and bulk system frequency. Here, the authors investigate the impact to the cyber‐physical power system in scenarios where communications and operations of DER are controlled by an adversary. The findings show that each grid‐support function exposes the power system to distinct types and magnitudes of risk. The physical impact from cyber actions was analysed in cases of DER providing distribution system voltage regulation and transmission system support. Finally, recommendations are presented for minimising the risk using engineered parameter limits and segmenting the control network to minimise common‐mode vulnerabilities.

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Integrated Smart Distribution RD&D Project Final Technical Report

Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), tasked OE with accelerating the commercialization, deployment and integration of advanced digital systems that are needed to modernize the nation’s electricity delivery network for enhanced interoperability and cyber security. To support this mandated task, a goal of the SGR&D Program is to develop technology with the ability to dynamically optimize grid operations and resources and incorporate demand response and consumer participation. The majority of historical research and development in the domain of distribution management systems (DMS) had focused on classical, radial and passive networks with one-way power flow from transmission to distribution systems and thus to the end customer. With the focus on customers, a bottom-up approach required a completely new thinking in real-time operations, and automation, of smart distribution systems. Thus, the GE team embarked on a project with a plan of two distinct phases. Work during the first phase concentrated on research and development (R&D) for the first three years. The second phase, lasting approximately two years, accomplished the demonstration of the use cases developed during the first phase, with further sharing and dissemination of the research at industry events. The consolidated technical scope of the project can be summarized into the following six areas: Advanced distribution modeling capability to accurately simulate/model smart grid operations. Accurate representation of the distribution system in real- or near real-time (capture real-time topology). Interoperability with, and seamless communication between, other management systems and databases used by the utility Simulation of distribution systems based on real-time operational planning to analyze the benefits of smart grid assets. Integration of network, market, and renewable resource models for next generation DMS. Management and forecasting of DER (Distributed Generation, Storage, Demand Response).

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗