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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Supporting Cyber Security of Power Distribution Systems by Detecting Differences Between Real-time Micro-Synchrophasor Measurements and Cyber-Reported SCADA (Final Report)

As modern power grids tend towards greater levels of automation and communication, the challenges of identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks are ones that are increasingly demanding attention. Today’s power system has evolved to form the foundational bedrock of modern society, and an attack on this infrastructure could prove disastrous. In this project we were tasked to investigate the use of distribution synchrophasors as an independent isolated sensor network with which we can corroborate, or flag potentially spoofed,Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) data. We adapted an approach to marry the underlying physical properties of power systems with the network communications used by power systems in order to offer insights unattainable by either data stream isolation. While the concept of intrusion detection systems (IDS) is well understood for monitoring network traffic and traditional IT computing systems, the approach discussed in this report is motivated by several key notions: first, current SCADA communications alone presents an incomplete view of the grid. Second, the power grid, and the equipment controlling it, is grounded by laws of physics. Given this, we leverage high-frequency physical grid measurements to understand the physical condition of the grid, and combine this with SCADA. While high-frequency physical grid measurements and SCADA communication over Internet Protocol (IP) networks are fundamentally disparate information sources, when collectively examined through appropriate lenses, they offer a much more nuanced depiction of the grid.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Responding To A Downed Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Platform

A drone may be forced down as part of a kinetic Counter-UAS action or as a spoof signal with a command to land immediately. A drone could also be incidentally discovered by an employee or by a random patrol. In each case, the platform should be considered a suspicious package until it can be determined to be nonhazardous by qualified personnel.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cybersecurity Certification Recommendations for Interconnected Grid Edge Devices and Inverter Based Resources

Escalating deployment of PV and grid-edge devices on the distribution grid has increased the sustainability and efficiency of the electric grid. However, the increasing number of distributed energy resources (DERs) deployed creates a heightened cyber-physical interdependency on the distribution grid and thus creates more vectors for cyber-attacks to exploit through information and communication technology (ICT) systems and networks. For example, control signal packets can be modified, intercepted, or corrupted due to vulnerabilities in communication protocols used by microgrid controllers and grid edge devices for power control. Therefore, to mitigate and prevent cyber-attacks on grid edge devices and the inverter-based resources connected to the distribution grid, the U.S. Department of Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) awarded funding to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) to research, develop, and harmonize cybersecurity standards for Photovoltaic (PV) systems and for other kinds of DERs. To help develop a standard for DER cybersecurity, NREL established certification recommendations and test cases, in consensus with the solar industry and UL, for ensuring intrinsic design security for DERs. These recommendations were developed to bolster the cybersecure functionalities such as TLS, MAC, CRL, session resumption/renegotiation, and password, system, and service security management within the DER devices. The proposed test cases verify authentication, authorization, confidentiality, and data integrity for data and communications of DERs that use Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). They were also developed to protect DER communications from eavesdropping, replay, man-in-the-middle, denial of service (DoS), spoofing through security certificates, least-privilege violation, and brute-force credentials. This report, which has been validated and reviewed by UL, expands upon those test cases to provide DER cybersecurity certification recommendations which increase DER resiliency and help to mitigate cyber-attacks. UL's collaboration with NREL and approval of this document will accelerate the adoption of a UL standard for DER cybersecurity.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Tempus Project (Final Report)

This final technical report tracks the accomplishments of the Tempus Project to the statement of project objectives and resulting deliverables. The objective of the Tempus project was to develop and demonstrate the capabilities of a secure, modular, and customizable time synchronization platform that provides layers of protection from GPS spoofing attacks and other vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities present a challenge to power system operators utilizing GPS-based time synchronization, as time synchronization increasingly plays a critical role in the efficient and reliable operation of power systems. The Tempus project addressed these concerns through the development of a secure, customizable time synchronization platform. The Tempus platform applies a layered approach to time security that protects from manipulation of timing systems used by power utilities. The Tempus platform consists of a component framework utilizing modularized time sources and customizable manipulation detection algorithms. With multiple time sources, and comparisons between sources and tracking sudden or subtle changes to the timing phase and time information, the Tempus system can detect and mitigate compromised timing sources.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Use of Legacy Maritime Protocols Increases Exploitability of Virtual Aids to Navigation

With increased reliance on Virtual Aid(s) to Navigation (VAtoN) - also known as electronic Aid(s) to Navigation (eAtoN), or virtual buoys - a cyber event is likely to cause disruption to international maritime shipping. VAtoN has no physical hardware for visual reference and displays only on a vessel’s Electronic Chart Display Information System (ECDIS) and Automatic Radar Plotting Aid (ARPA); therefore, mariners must rely on the accuracy of the information provided. As VAtoN uses the National Maritime Electronics Association (NMEA) 0183 protocol for both Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Automatic Identification System (AIS), an insecure protocol that has been proven susceptible to spoofing, denial, and manipulation, the likelihood of a cyber-related event increases substantially.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2024

Cyber Resilience in the Cast Timing System

Our task within the DarkNet project was to test the cyber resiliency of the Center for Alternate Synchronization and Timing’s (CAST) framework. We focused our testing on two of the core pieces of CAST’s implementation, a Juniper MX204 router and the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). In this report, we cover the following attempted methods of attack on our targets: ping flood, fork bomb, network protocol fuzzing, ARP poisoning, and IGMP spoofing. We found that delaying certain packets, specifically Delay Request, had a significant impact on the Offset from Master and Observed Drift timing statistics.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Developing an intrinsically secure information barrier for arms control verification through machine learning

Near-term solutions are needed to allow for flexible engagement in future nuclear arms control discussions. This project developed a method for implementing an information barrier (IB) on commercial systems, shortening the research and development lifecycle for warhead verification technologies while offering improved and inherently flexible capabilities. The crux of the verification challenge remains the difficulty in developing an authenticatable IB which prevents sensitive host country information from inadvertent transmission to an inspector. Many concepts for IB’s rely on dedicated “trusted” processor modules developed with dedicated custom radiation detection systems and associated algorithms. Without a priori knowledge of the treaty item, the parameter space for measurements can be nearly infinite and robustness against spoofing without the ability to view sensitive data is key. This project has produced an unclassified framework capable of ingesting data from common gamma detectors and identifying the presence of weapons grade nuclear material at over 90% accuracy.

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

Edge ML for CAN bus intrusion detection in AVs

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are revolutionizing transportation, but their reliance on interconnected cyber-physical systems exposes them to unprecedented cybersecurity risks. This study addresses the critical challenge of detecting real-time cyber intrusions in self-driving vehicles by leveraging a dataset from the Udacity self-driving car project. We simulate four high-impact attack vectors, Denial of Service (DoS), spoofing, replay, and fuzzy attacks, by injecting noise into spatial features (e.g., bounding box coordinates) to replicate adversarial scenarios. We develop and evaluate two lightweight neural network architectures (NN-1 and NN-2) alongside a logistic regression baseline (LG-1) for intrusion detection. The models achieve exceptional performance, with NN-2 attaining an AUC score of 93.15% and 93.15% accuracy, demonstrating their suitability for edge deployment in AV environments. Through explainable AI techniques, we uncover unique forensic fingerprints of each attack type, such as spatial corruption in fuzzy attacks and temporal anomalies in replay attacks, offering actionable insights for feature engineering and proactive defense. Visual analytics, including confusion matrices, ROC curves, and feature importance plots, validate the models' robustness and interpretability. This research sets a new benchmark for AV cybersecurity, delivering a scalable, field-ready toolkit for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and policymakers. By aligning intrusion fingerprints with SAE J3061 automotive security standards, we provide a pathway for integrating machine learning into safety-critical AV systems. Our findings underscore the urgent need for security-by-design AI, ensuring that AVs not only drive autonomously but also defend autonomously. This work bridges the gap between theoretical cybersecurity and life-preserving engineering, offering a leap toward safer, more secure autonomous transportation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2020

Evaluating software defined networking solutions to reduce the digital attack surface of nuclear security systems

Most nuclear security systems used today were not designed for today’s threat environment. Systems that were intended to be stand alone are now interconnected. Devices that have a single purpose are built on multi-purpose platforms and communication protocols that, while effective, have no ability to authenticate authorized versus unauthorized commands. These attributes provide an attacker significant ability to affect the system, pivot throughout the interconnected networks, and remain undetected if he/she is able to compromise a single node. Software defined networking (SDN) has been used for years by information technology (IT) cloud service providers to quickly provision or remove servers or other systems to meet changing demand. The same concept has recently been applied to operational technology (OT) systems to enable very fast failover on critical systems that have stringent and deterministic (<5ms) transmit/receive times. By carefully engineering the communication flows through a network using preplanned routes and specific pathways it is possible to achieve deterministic and extremely reliable message delivery even when components fail. This engineering approach to network design has added security benefits including securing the networking control plane, eliminating network scanning and mapping, inhibiting ARP spoofing and host masquerading, eliminating unauthorized network pivoting and enabling greater situational awareness on the network. SDN in OT environments is new but early testing in electrical power and other critical infrastructure has shown it to be a very powerful tool for building reliable networks and reducing the digital attack surface of the network. The authors tested a software defined network switch on a simple physical protection system with components commonly found in nuclear security systems and found improved mitigations to denial of service attacks, lateral movement and network reconnaissance. The paper details the tests and their results.

Cyber security, Nuclear security, software defined↗
DOE OSTI2021

Beacon-based precision navigation and timing (PNT) system

Beacon-based Precision Navigation and Timing (PNT) may use a constellation of space vehicles (e.g., small, low cost satellites) coupled to a network of ground stations and a network of beacons. Such a system be provided at a cost that is approximately 100 times lower than GPS both to build and to operate. The resulting system may also provide fast acquisition, improved SNR, improved anti-jam and anti-spoofing capabilities, and six-inch scale location determination, making it applicable to both existing PNT applications and enabling new applications.

Judd, Stephen↗
DOE OSTI2025

Data Centers and Digital Assurance Introduction to Supply Chain and Cybersecurity for Data Centers, Session 1

The first session of the TADA (Technical Assistance for Digital Assurance) Data Centers Cohort Workshop, held on October 30, 2025, introduced foundational concepts of Digital Assurance in the context of data center and grid integration. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the workshop brought together utilities, data center operators, developers, and vendors to address cybersecurity and supply chain vulnerabilities. The session emphasized the growing criticality of data centers within the electric grid and the need for secure, real-time, bidirectional communication. Participants explored the principles of Digital Assurance, including cybersecurity, cyber-informed engineering (CIE), and lifecycle security, and applied a threat-vulnerability-consequence framework to identify and mitigate risks at the data center–grid interface. Discussions covered a range of threats such as spoofed dispatch signals and insider threats, architectural vulnerabilities like SCADA interfaces and insecure protocols, and potential consequences including cascading grid failures. The session also raised strategic questions about business value, vendor assurance, and defining cyber boundaries and responsibilities. This foundational workshop set the stage for deeper technical analysis and the development of actionable frameworks in subsequent sessions. Session 1 of 3.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2026

Towards Secure Autonomous Vehicles: An Integrated Edge and Multi-Modal Machine Learning Framework for Intrusion Detection

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are vulnerable to cyberattacks targeting both internal communication networks and external perception sensors. While edge-based intrusion de- tection for Controller Area Network (CAN) buses offers real-time protection, it cannot detect cross-modal threats. Conversely, multi-modal fusion approaches improve coverage but often lack efficiency for in-vehicle deployment. This thesis integrates two complemen- tary solutions: (1) a lightweight, edge-deployable machine learning framework for CAN bus intrusion detection, and (2) a late-fusion system combining CAN FD and LiDAR data. Together, they form a hierarchical defense capable of handling single-modality and coordi- nated attacks. Simulations show that CAN-only models reach 93% accuracy on simulated DoS, spoofing, replay, and fuzzy attacks, while the fusion system achieves 0.87 AUC and 0.82 F1-score at 2 ms latency. This unified framework establishes a scalable, explainable, and field-ready strategy for AV cybersecurity.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

CONTROL AND DATA ACQUISITION IN A CYBER-PHYSICAL MIDSTREAM TESTBED

This thesis presents the development of a laboratory-scale cyber–physical midstream pipeline testbed designed to address this gap and support research in industrial control systems security. The platform integrates pumps, valves, sensors, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and a human–machine interface (HMI) to emulate the monitoring and control architecture of real pipeline operations. The physical process is implemented as a closed-loop liquid circulation system designed to replicate flow behavior characteristic of midstream pipeline infrastructure. The testbed enables real-time data acquisition of key process variables, including flow rate and pressure facilitating the generation of datasets representative of normal pipeline operation. A threat model encompassing common ICS attack vectors was developed, including sensor spoofing, command injection, false data injection, denial-of-service attacks, and relay manipulation. Multiple attack scenarios were implemented and evaluated to demonstrate how cyber intrusions targeting sensors, actuators, networks, and software propagate into measurable physical consequences in pipeline flow and pressure. The developed platform serves as a practical, cost-effective environment for experimentation, education, and future cybersecurity research in midstream pipeline systems.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Proactive Intrusion Detection and Mitigation System

SAND2023-05661O The proactive intrusion detection and mitigation system (PIDMS) provides grid-edge situational awareness for cybersecurity defense by capturing real-time distributed energy resource (DER) network traffic and performance data with a novel approach that improves the detection and prevention of cyber-physical attacks. The PIDMS addresses the grid-edge security gap with real-time analysis of both network traffic and photovoltaic performance data to deliver a novel, cyber-physical intrusion detection system (IDS) approach that increases the accuracy and effectiveness of detection and mitigation. This hybrid IDS analysis enables dual monitoring that increases the workload of the adversary; both cyber and physical data would have to be simultaneously spoofed to evade detection. Furthermore, monitoring and analyzing cyber data are insufficient in some cases. For example, in an insider threat aimed at disrupting inverter grid-support functions where proper credentials and authentication are achieved, only the altered PV performance would indicate abnormal behavior. All in all, the PIDMS provides novel capabilities for: • Distributed, real-time cyber-physical detection and mitigation analysis • Cybersecurity defense for grid-edge systems • Analysis framework that can provide situational awareness across the transmission, distribution, and DER systems The PIDMS sensor is designed to collect cyber-physical data, process the data using machine-learning algorithms, detect abnormal events, and deploy mitigations. With these goals, the main functional PIDMS objectives are: • Capability to collect cyber-physical data • Onboard storage of cyber-physical data • Peer-to-peer communication • Computationally efficient machine-learning algorithms • Online cyber-physical data analysis • Alerting/visualization capabilities • Mitigation deployment capability with bump-in-the-wire (BITW) implementation Each of these functional objectives enable PIDMS to perform effective cyber-physical intrusion detection and mitigation. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Jones, Christian↗