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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 55 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Large-Scale Hydrogen Storage Cyber Risk Assessment

Hydrogen storage systems are becoming more widely deployed throughout the country, and as their presence continues to grow, it is possible that individual and interconnected systems will be exposed to cyber-attacks. These events can cause physical and financial harm to employees, people in the vicinity, and to the company that owns the facility. The two main mechanisms malicious actors may access information or control from a hydrogen storage facility are through information technology and operations technology devices, the former of which refers to data and information from networked devices and the latter of which refers to onsite controls for the physical system. Both types of entryways into the system should be considered when facility managers conduct cyber risk assessments and when regulators develop or revise relevant codes and standards. This report analyzes cybersecurity risks applicable to a wide variety of hydrogen storage systems by outlining the system's purpose and the importance of its cybersecurity. The hydrogen storage system architecture and communication protocols are provided to understand potential cyber vulnerabilities. Later, an event tree analysis is performed on hydrogen operation to identify system weaknesses by outlining potential attack scenarios. This report also identifies critical cyber assets related to different hydrogen operations followed by an examination of potential threats, and the impact of cyber assets on those operational assets.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2025

ARCADE Technical Pathway and Industry Impact

The Advanced Reactor Cyber Analysis and Development Environment (ARCADE) simplifies the evaluation and assessment of robustness factor and cyber resilience that support secure-by-design for advanced reactor nuclear power plants. In this manner, ARCADE supports risk-informed performance based (RIPB) evaluations of cybersecurity through its integration of plant physics with high-fidelity emulations of control systems. This cross domain approach enables comprehensive analysis of control system sensitivities, cyber-attack scenarios, and their consequences. ARCADE has been custom developed to meet the demands identified in Tier 1 of the Tiered Cyber Analysis (TCA) as outlined in NRC Draft Regulation Guide (RG) 5.96, which provides a RIPB cybersecurity approach for new reactors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Real-Time Testbed for Smart Inverter Cyber Security Studies

Distributed energy resources (DER) have become a popular solution to modern-day issues surrounding the efficiency and reliability of power generation, as well as climate change concerns. Energy centers are shifting towards incorporating smart inverters with embedded functionalities such as high voltage ride through (HVRT), low voltage ride through (LVRT), active and reactive power compensation. However, the integration of smart inverters leave DER systems highly vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. The distributed network protocol 3 (DNP3) is a common method of communication between grid-tied hardware. Despite its popularity, the level of security leaves all hardware connected to the grid at risk of severe cyber-attacks. Thus, it is important to study any potential cybersecurity threats towards grid-tied smart inverters to mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities and refine existing cyber-security protections. This report describes the proposed testbed design to study cybersecurity threats to smart inverters. The testbed utilizes a real-time simulation case in RSCAD that includes a grid-tied wind turbine (WT) topology featuring two back-to-back two-level voltage source converters (BTB,2L-VSCs) and a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM). The simulated case runs within the NovaCor real time digital simulator (RTDS). This report focuses on the design and implementation of a single module of the GTNETx2 card as a distributed network protocol and the configuration of an IEEE 1518 DNP database file that includes input and output variables mapped to different connection points in the grid that transmit and receive discrete, analog, and binary signals on command. This allows realistic emulation of the communication between the smart inverter and the grid for cybersecurity studies.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Essence2.0 Development and Deployment (Final Report)

The objective of the project was to take two core technologies that have been developed under the Recipient’s solid laboratory products and integrate them into a single CyberPhysical awareness platform and complete development on current field-tested prototypes that will extend the integrated capability of the platform. During the final development phase, the Recipient development team and its selected industry partners tested and hardened the platform to ensure resilient and secure operation of the integrated platform. The team also executed substantial field testing and established the framework for defining the organization and/or commercial infrastructure needed to sustain operations and provide readiness for a national scale deployment. The focus of the project was (1) the improvement, refinement, and deployment of technology for the detection of cyber-attacks on utility operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) networks and assets, including Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems (SCADA) systems; and (2) support for containment and remediation of adversarial threats and actions against those systems and environments.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Bayesian Attack Model (BAM) User Story

This document presents a user story for the Bayesian Attack Model (BAM) tool designed to aggregate and analyze cyber-attack observables for operational technology (OT) systems. BAM aims to empower cybersecurity analysts by providing a streamlined interface for collecting observable data from various sources, enabling real-time analysis of potential adversary activity. By enhancing the response capabilities of security teams, BAM facilitates risk-informed decision-making and improves organizational security posture. This user story outlines the key functionalities, user interactions, and requirements necessary to successfully integrate BAM with other security information and event management (SIEM) technology and cybersecurity operations centers (CSOCs).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

SCEPTRE: A Cyber-Physical Emulation Capability

Cyber-physical systems form a critical but vulnerable backbone to US critical infrastructure. Recent high-profile cyber-attacks have shown the need for increased assessment and hardening of these systems. However, such assessments and investigations into advanced technologies to harden these systems is difficult due to their operational nature. Instead, modeling of these systems is heavily leveraged. Investigation into these complex systems and their potential cascading failures requires comprehensive modeling of both the cyber and physical components of the system. This paper introduces SCEPTRE, an emulation capability to address this need.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2025

CIE Curriculum Guide (V.2.0)

The Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) Curriculum Guide offers a comprehensive framework, guidance, and resources for integrating CIE into university-level engineering programs and related educational activities. The primary goal is to help educators adopt CIE principles into their teaching to produce future engineers and technicians who understand digital risks in modern engineered systems, thereby addressing the nation’s infrastructure resilience needs. This guide outlines practical integration examples, links to resources to accelerate CIE adoption, and shares insights from partner academic institutions on various implementation strategies. CIE is a framework for embedding engineered controls that mitigate the impact of cyber-attacks in any cyber-physical system used in critical energy infrastructure and other sectors. Developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), the National Cyber-Informed Engineering Strategy emphasizes embedding CIE into formal education, training, and credentialing. This guide supports this strategic objective by providing examples of integrating CIE concepts into engineering curricula, from class activities to new courses and certificate programs. The importance of educating cyber-informed engineers is underscored by the evolving cybersecurity threats facing engineered systems. As industrial control systems (ICS) increasingly incorporate digital technologies, the responsibility for security extends to both cyber professionals and engineers. CIE addresses critical gaps in designing and protecting physical systems with digital components against cyber risks, ensuring engineers consider digital risk throughout the engineering design lifecycle. Currently, engineering education does not routinely include cyber-informed principles, highlighting a gap in addressing modern engineering system risks. This guide advocates for updating engineering curricula to include digital risk management as a fundamental element. By doing so, future engineers will be equipped to design resilient systems that mitigate digital risks from the outset. Through this guide, engineering faculty can integrate CIE into their curricula, bridging the gap between digital risk and engineering. This approach prepares a cyber-informed workforce capable of safeguarding the cyber-physical systems crucial to national security and public welfare. By embedding CIE into education and training, institutions can produce engineers and technicians who can effectively mitigate cyber impacts throughout the engineering design lifecycle, resulting in more secure critical infrastructures.

42 - ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) – Engineered Controls Database and Use

Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) addresses the reality that cyber-attacks on engineered systems can have consequences far beyond data loss or disruption of digital networks. When control systems are compromised, safety, reliability, and performance of the physical process itself may be threatened. This database is meant to establish clear examples and guidance for defining and applying engineered controls in CIE. It explains what engineered controls are, how they differ from information security measures, and how they are integrated into system design. The goal is to ensure that resilience is engineered into systems from the outset. Unlike cybersecurity protections that defend the digital layer, engineered controls act directly at the physical and algorithmic levels to guarantee that unacceptable consequences are prevented or limited. CIE keeps the consequences of a cyber attack from impacting the safety, reliability, and performance of engineered systems.

42 - ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2026

Resilience Through Data-Driven, Intelligent Designed Control: A Formal Methods Approach

The PNNL and GTRI team developed a strategy to integrate temporal logic rule specification for detection of cyber-intrusion in the source code and control algorithms of CPS using advanced cyber-data. The GTRI team utilized its capabilities in rule synthesis and temporal logic specifications for software assurance and verification to detect and predict impact of cyber-intrusions and malware in the computational and control algorithms of cyber-physical systems. The team also developed a testing and verification approach that could be used to validate the suggested approach against a realistic use-case CPS showcasing improvements in system impact prediction performance. Temporal logic offers a compact expression of events in absolute and relative time and has a formalized translation to state machines. As such, temporal logic rules can feasibly be synthesized to any system as a rule engine, with the process being formally verified to be correct. The goal here is to utilize temporal logic rules to detect cyber-attacks and manipulations in the computational algorithms and provide real-time software assurance and verification guarantees.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Time Synchronization Techniques in the Modern Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey

In modern smart grids, accurate and synchronized time signals are essential for effective monitoring, protection, and control. Various time synchronization methods exist, each tailored to specific application needs. Widely adopted solutions, such as GPS, however, are vulnerable to challenges such as signal loss and cyber-attacks, underscoring the need for reliable backup or supplementary solutions. This paper examines the timing requirements across different power grid applications and provides a comprehensive review of available time synchronization mechanisms. Through a comparative analysis of timing methods based on accuracy, flexibility, reliability, and security, this study offers insights to guide the selection of optimal solutions for seamless grid integration.

comparison↗
DOE OSTI2023

Quantum Key Distribution for Critical Infrastructures: Towards Cyber-Physical Security for Hydropower and Dams

Hydropower facilities are often remotely monitored or controlled from a centralized remote control room. Additionally, major component manufacturers monitor the performance of installed components, increasingly via public communication infrastructures. While these communications enable efficiencies and increased reliability, they also expand the cyber-attack surface. Communications may use the internet to remote control a facility’s control systems, or it may involve sending control commands over a network from a control room to a machine. The content could be encrypted and decrypted using a public key to protect the communicated information. These cryptographic encoding and decoding schemes become vulnerable as more advances are made in computer technologies, such as quantum computing. In contrast, quantum key distribution (QKD) and other quantum cryptographic protocols are not based upon a computational problem, and offer an alternative to symmetric cryptography in some scenarios. Although the underlying mechanism of quantum cryptogrpahic protocols such as QKD ensure that any attempt by an adversary to observe the quantum part of the protocol will result in a detectable signature as an increased error rate, potentially even preventing key generation, it serves as a warning for further investigation. In QKD, when the error rate is low enough and enough photons have been detected, a shared private key can be generated known only to the sender and receiver. We describe how this novel technology and its several modalities could benefit the critical infrastructures of dams or hydropower facilities. The presented discussions may be viewed as a precursor to a quantum cybersecurity roadmap for the identification of relevant threats and mitigation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

OT Operational Anomaly Detection (OAD) T&D + DER

The growth of utility-scale renewable energy resources, distributed energy resources (DER), and transportation electrification has increased uncertainty and cybersecurity risks in power grids. The Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture model which is widely adopted by the utility industry is now insufficient to protect the power grid against cyber-attacks. There is a need to identify what cybersecurity model is effective on Energy Management System (EMS), Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS), and DER Management System (DERMS) to address the fundamental cybersecurity challenges in the age of increasing renewable energy and DER share as well as consumer participation in the electric energy industry. The next generation of cybersecurity model for OT network should be able to detect inside attackers, mitigate the cybersecurity risks arising from the new grid participants including DER aggregators, electric vehicle owners, and behind-the-meter consumers outside the utility company, and develop the strategy to trust consumer measurement data. This panel will discuss the challenges and pathways for the development of an ensemble cybersecurity model based on predictive state estimation to detect cybersecurity anomalies in OT network including EMS, ADMS, and DERMS.

cybersecurity↗
DOE OSTI2023

Robust and cybersecure coordinated unintentional island detection for microgrids

Unintentional islanding (UI) of a circuit of distributed energy resources (DERs) may leave area electrical power systems (EPS), external to the DER circuit, energized. Thus, UI detection methods have been developed to detect unintentional islanding and trigger a UI response. However, individual UI detection methods have various deficiencies. Thus, a consensus-based UI detection process is disclosed that builds a consensus from multiple UI detection sources, optionally implementing different UI detection methods. The redundancy in this consensus-based UI detection process provides robust, sensitive, selective, and cybersecure UI detection for the entire DER circuit. For example, the consensus-based UI detection process may eliminate or reduce non-detection zones, avoid false positives, thwart cyber-attacks, and/or the like.

Brissette, Alex↗
DOE OSTI2024

Does practice make perfect? Lessons learned from full-scale power system incident response exercise

While threats to the energy sector occur daily, few utilities get the opportunity to fully test out their detection and response mechanisms to advanced threats in the real world. With the high demand for reliability, few grid operators would allow execution of simulated cyber-attacks on their live systems. The DOE-funded Liberty Eclipse project offers a unique opportunity for small and large utilities and coops to practice their combined IT/OT responses to a live red team executing attacks against an isolated power system on an island in New York. Both cyber teams and power operations teams must work together to detect and respond to attacks, even restoring the power system against extreme impacts. Lessons learned from these exercises reveal key takeaways for understanding what a real attack against the electric sector will look like, gaps in execution of the best-laid plans when the pressure of a real event is bearing down, and how organizations can better prepare for advanced attacks by optimizing participation in exercises. This presentation will discuss successes and opportunities for improvement both in how utilities can prepare for and respond to events, as well as how full-scale IT/OT exercises can be coordinated.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Software defined networking moving target defense honeypot

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and storage media for thwarting cyber-attacks and data theft. A computing system receives packets and compares with a configuration resource. The computing system determines that the packet does not match the configuration resource and transmits a packet to a decoy environment via an SDN switch. The decoy environment is configured to generate time-out, service unavailable, or restricted access messages. In some embodiments, the computing system determines the packet does match the configuration and transmits the packet to a production network via an SDN switch. The SDN switch is communicatively connected to the decoy environment through a first channel and communicatively connected to a production environment through a separate second channel. The computing system is further configured to create and transmit to the SDN switch, rules to manage transmitting the packet to either the decoy environment or the production environment.

Lyle, Joshua A.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Internship Presentation: Integrating Safety and Cybersecurity: Security-by-Design with SOWT Analysis for Reactor Testing

This study covers leveraging reactor testing facilities that are primarily designed with a focus on safety to enhance cybersecurity testing. By incorporating reactor security-by-design with reactor safety-by-design principles and adopting defense-in-depth strategies that emphasize both safety and security, the research evaluates applicable cyber tools, models, and solutions. This includes simulating specific cyber-attack scenarios using reactor simulators and performing SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to improve the cybersecurity of reactor systems.

21 - SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLAN↗
DOE OSTI2026

Smart Inverters, Dumb Risk: Taking Control of IBR Security in the Digital Age

This presentation addresses the security challenges posed by Inverter-Based Resources (IBRs) in the modern energy landscape. The presentation highlights the vulnerabilities and risks associated with IBRs, including the potential for cyber-attacks, the impact of insecure defaults, and the systemic risks posed by supply chain dependencies. Key topics covered include: 1) The increasing digital transformation in energy systems and the associated security risks. 2) Specific vulnerabilities in IBRs, including weak passwords, hardcoded credentials, and insecure web application interfaces. 3) The implications of persistent connectivity and the strategic risks posed by foreign-manufactured components. 4) The role of regulatory frameworks, such as NERC CIP, in addressing these challenges and the limitations of current oversight. 5) Practical solutions for mitigating risks, including secure design practices, vendor risk assessments, and the importance of strong passwords and role-based access control. The presentation underscores the necessity of a comprehensive, system-of-systems approach to securing IBRs, emphasizing the need for collaboration across various stakeholders, including operators, developers, and regulators, to ensure the resilience and security of the energy grid.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗