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At least 19 records

A Novel Authentication Management for the Data Security of Smart Grid

Bidirectional wireless communication is employed in various smart grid components such as smart meters and control and monitoring applications where security is vital. The Trusted Third Party (TTP) and wireless connectivity between the smart meter and the third party in the key management-based encryption techniques for the smart grid are expected to be totally trustworthy and dependable. In a wired/wireless medium, however, a man-in-the-middle may seek to disrupt, monitor and manipulate the network, or simply execute a replay attack, revealing its vulnerability. Recognizing this, this study presents a novel authentication management (model) comprised of two layer security schema. The first layer implements an efficient novel encryption method for secure data exchange between meters and control center with the help of two partially trusted simple servers (constitutes the TTP). In this setting, one server handles the data encryption between the meter and control center/central database, and the other server administers the random sequence of data transmission. The second layer monitors and verifies exchanged data packets among smart meters. It detects abnormal packets from suspicious sources. To implement this node-to-node authentication, One class support vector machine algorithm is proposed which takes advantages of the location information as well as the data transmission history (node identification, packet size, and data transmission frequency). This schema secures data communication, and imposes a comprehensive privacy throughout the system without considerably extending the complexity of the conventional key management scheme.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

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.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Transportation Secure Data Center: Frequently Asked Questions for Data Owners/Contributors

The Transportation Secure Data Center is a centralized repository for detailed transportation data from travel and transit surveys and studies conducted across the nation. It makes vital transportation data broadly available to users while preserving the privacy of survey participants. Hundreds of datasets from surveys and studies of household travel and transit passenger travel are archived in the TSDC, including surveys and studies conducted by state departments of transportation, metropolitan planning organizations, transit agencies, cities, and other public agencies. Detailed data from travel surveys and studies are extremely valuable for research purposes. However, the fine-grained information they contain could potentially be misused to identify individual travelers, so access to these data should only be granted with safeguards in place to protect participant privacy. The TSDC was created to address this challenge and to relieve public agencies from the burden of archiving their data and responding to data requests.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

High-Reliability Systems and the Control of National Security Data and Information

High-reliability systems are characterized by catastrophic implications in the event of failure. These implications can include substantive damage to the environment, social order, and loss of life. Examples of high-reliability systems include nuclear submarines, nuclear reactors, the electric grid, and nuclear weapons. Due to the catastrophic implications of failure, there are heightened awareness and control mechanisms surrounding related data and information. However, defining the difference between data and information is often ambiguous across scholarly disciplines and in United States policy and legislation. For high-reliability systems, the implications of ambiguity between data and information may affect the security of United States interests and even cost lives. For security, data are raw facts or figures without context, while information is the compilation or articulation of data that forms context. Security depends on clarity in the differences between data and information and how to control them. Control is necessary to ensure that data and information are not unintentionally released to foreign governments, the public, or those without need-to-know. A primary concern in the practice of security is the control of data to avoid the unintended conversion to information. Intra-institutionally, this control is highly complex given the amalgam of legacy data systems and the numerous and constantly evolving nature of modern data systems that were not necessarily designed to be integrated. The complexity of this concern is augmented when institutions are part of interinstitutional collaborations or networks of public-private partnerships that share data and information. Additionally, institutions that share data as a function of policy and legislative action— particularly formally integrated data and information system infrastructures—may be at higher security risk. This paper will present an intra-institutional paradigm that utilizes and integrates concepts from numerous disciplines to frame a critical and underspecified practical issue in security—controlling for the unintended conversion of data to information.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗

High-Reliability Systems and the Control of National Security Data and Information

High-reliability systems are characterized by catastrophic implications in the event of failure. These implications can include substantive damage to the environment, social order, and loss of life. Examples of high-reliability systems include nuclear submarines, nuclear reactors, the electric grid, and nuclear weapons. Due to the catastrophic implications of failure, there are heightened awareness and control mechanisms surrounding related data and information. However, defining the difference between data and information is often ambiguous across scholarly disciplines and in United States policy and legislation. For high-reliability systems, the implications of ambiguity between data and information may affect the security of United States interests and even cost lives. For security, data are raw facts or figures without context, while information is the compilation or articulation of data that forms context. Security depends on clarity in the differences between data and information and how to control them. Control is necessary to ensure that data and information are not unintentionally released to foreign governments, the public, or those without need-to-know. A primary concern in the practice of security is the control of data to avoid the unintended conversion to information. Intra-institutionally, this control is highly complex given the amalgam of legacy data systems and the numerous and constantly evolving nature of modern data systems that were not necessarily designed to be integrated. The complexity of this concern is augmented when institutions are part of inter-institutional collaborations or networks of public-private partnerships that share data and information. Additionally, institutions that share data as a function of policy and legislative action—particularly formally integrated data and information system infrastructures—may be at higher security risk. This paper will present an intra-institutional paradigm that utilizes and integrates concepts from numerous disciplines to frame a critical and underspecified practical issue in security—controlling for the unintended conversion of data to information.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗

TSDC: Transportation Secure Data Center: Real-World Data for Planning, Modeling, and Analysis

The Transportation Secure Data Center is a centralized repository for high-resolution transportation data from hundreds of travel and transit surveys and studies. It makes vital transportation data broadly available to users while preserving the privacy of survey participants. It houses surveys and studies conducted by state departments of transportation, metropolitan planning organizations, transit agencies, cities, and other public agencies. Meanwhile, the Livewire Data Platform empowers research, industry, and academic partners to easily and securely preserve, maintain, share, discover, and gain access to transportation and mobility data. Livewire accommodates a range of datasets, including behavioral, experimental, model, analytical, and raw data at the vehicle, traveler, and system levels. Datasets support mobility research and planning spanning urban science, connected and automated vehicles, fueling and charging infrastructure, mobility decision science, multimodal transportation, vehicle efficiency, and more.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Secure Data Logging and Processing with Blockchain and Machine Learning (Final Report)

Secure Data Logging and Processing with Blockchain and Machine Learning (ML) research is focused on the development of a platform to securely log and process sensor data in fossil power plants. The platform integrates two emerging technologies, blockchain and ML, and incorporates several innovative mechanisms to ensure the integrity, reliability, and resiliency of power systems. The goal is to protect the power plant from various cyberattacks such as false data injection and denial of service attacks using these technologies. The research goal was enabled by the following Research Project Objectives: 1) Secure authentication and identity verification of sensor nodes, actuators, and other equipment within a network. 2) Development of mechanisms that ensure only data sent by legitimate sensors are accepted and stored in the data repository. 3) Development of data aggregation methodologies using ML / Deep Learning (DL) algorithms to minimize noise / faulty data. 4) Implementation of the blockchain technologies to provide data security using secured IOTA framework & nodes.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗

Hybridizing Classifiers and Collection Systems to Maximize Intelligence and Minimize Uncertainty in National Security Data Analytics Applications

There are numerous applications that combine data collected from sensors with machine-learning based classification models to predict the type of event or objects observed. Both the collection of the data itself and the classification models can be tuned for optimal performance, but we hypothesize that additional gains can be realized by jointly assessing both factors together. Through this research, we used a seismic event dataset and two neural network classification models that issued probabilistic predictions on each event to determine whether it was an earthquake or a quarry blast. Real world applications will have constraints on data collection, perhaps in terms of a budget for the number of sensors or on where, when, or how data can be collected. We mimicked such constraints by creating subnetworks of sensors with both size and locational constraints. We compare different methods of determining the set of sensors in each subnetwork in terms of their predictive accuracy and the number of events that they observe overall. Additionally, we take the classifiers into account, treating them both as black-box models and testing out various ways of combining predictions among models and among the set of sensors that observe any given event. We find that comparable overall performance can be seen with less than half the number of sensors in the full network. Additionally, a voting scheme that uses the average confidence across the sensors for a given event shows improved predictive accuracy across nearly all subnetworks. Lastly, locational constraints matter, but sometimes in unintuitive ways, as better-performing sensors may be chosen instead of the ones excluded based on location. This being a short-term research effort, we offer a lengthy discussion on interesting next-steps and ties to other ongoing research efforts that we did not have time to pursue. These include a detailed analysis of the subnetwork performance broken down by event type, specific location, and model confidence. This project also included a Campus Executive research partnership with Texas A&M University. Through this, we worked with a professor and student to study information gain for UAV routing. This was an alternative way of looking at the similar problem space that includes sensor operation for data collection and the resulting benefit to be gained from it. This work is described in an Appendix.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Distributed Ledger Technology Preliminary Performance Assessment for Applications in Utilities Operational Technology

This paper provides descriptions of the key components of different distributed ledger technology platforms. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) allows for distribution of databases among different organizations and devices. The platforms use cryptographically linked “blocks” to store and verify transactional information between these organizations. DLT increases data security, data integrity, trust among its participants. Different organizations are looking to deploy this distributed and decentralized approach to avoid the single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities associated with centralized data repositories. In this study we examine twelve different DLT platforms. There is agreement within the community that of all the platforms considered here, Hyperledger and Ethereum are the most mature when it comes to privacy and permissions. These DLT platforms are being used for applications such as transactive energy, health care, and the food and goods supply chain. However, further development is required to realize the full promise of DLT. Our assessment includes a general description of each DLT and its key characteristics. Such characteristics include consensus protocol and cryptography used, public vs. private, and permissioned or permissionless. The selection and implementation of a DLT architecture depends heavily on the use case and performance requirements. During this research we found key parameters to measure performance and existing tools for assessment. Four different parameters were identified 1) consensus, 2) throughput, 3) latency, and 4) scalability. The architectures of Hyperledger Caliper and Blockbench are described as different performance assessment frameworks. From this preliminary study it is evident that there are dissimilarities on the performance assessments methods developers and users are characterizing DLT architectures. The purpose of this paper is to identify key parameters to test performance, tools that are being used and provide information on results from previous studies.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Method and apparatus for data protection in memory devices

An apparatus and method for efficiently transmitting data are described. A transmitter sends data to a receiver. An encoder of the transmitter divides a received first block of data into multiple sub-blocks. The encoder selects a portion of each sub-block to compare to one another. A portion in a particular sub-block has a same offset and a same size as other portions of other sub-blocks. If the encoder determines the multiple portions match one another, the encoder sends, to the receiver, a second block of data corresponding to the first block of data. The second block of data has a same size as a size of the received first block of data, and the second block of data includes security data from one of multiple error correction schemes. Therefore, the second block of data provides security without increasing an amount of data to transmit.

SeyedzadehDelcheh, SeyedMohammad↗

Data-Driven Security Assessment of Power Grids Based on Machine Learning Approach: Preprint

Data-driven security assessment provides key indicators on power system stability using simulations on scheduling models, as opposed to dynamic simulations that are more time-consuming. This paper investigates data-driven security assessment of power grids based on machine learning. Multivariate random forest regression is used as the machine learning algorithm due to its high robustness to the input data. Three stability issues are analyzed using the proposed machine learning tool, including transient stability, frequency stability and small signal stability. The estimation values from machine learning tool are compared with those from dynamic simulations. Results show that the proposed machine learning tool can effectively predict the stability margins for the three stability metrics.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

RouteE: A Vehicle Energy Consumption Prediction Engine

The emergence of connected and automated vehicles and smart cities technologies create the opportunity for new mobility modes and routing decision tools, among many others. To achieve maximum mobility and minimum energy consumption, it is critical to understand the energy cost of decisions and optimize accordingly. The Route Energy prediction model (RouteE) enables accurate estimation of energy consumption for a variety of vehicle types over trips or sub-trips where detailed drive cycle data are unavailable. Applications include vehicle route selection, energy accounting and optimization in transportation simulation, and corridor energy analyses, among others. The software is a Python package that includes a variety of pre-trained models from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). However, RouteE also enables users to train custom models using their own data sets, making it a robust and valuable tool for both fast calculations and rigorous, data-rich research efforts. The pre-trained RouteE models are established using NREL’s Future Automotive Systems Technology Simulator paired with approximately 1 million miles of drive cycle data from the Transportation Secure Data Center, resulting in energy consumption behavior estimates over a representative sample of driving conditions for the United States. Validations have been performed using on-road fuel consumption data for conventional and electrified vehicle powertrains. Transferring the results of the on-road validation to a larger set of real-world origin-destination pairs, it is estimated that implementing the present methodology in a green-routing application would accurately select the route that consumes the least fuel 90% of the time. The novel machine learning techniques used in RouteE make it a flexible and robust tool for a variety of transportation applications.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

The Data Foundry: Secure Collaboration for the Geothermal Industry: Preprint

The Data Foundry provides secure, cloud-based storage and universal access to digital information, enabling the greater geothermal industry to collaborate seamlessly with the Department of Energy (DOE), national labs, universities, and private organizations. Originally developed to support the EGS Collab project, the Data Foundry has been expanded to support FORGE, EDGE, and other DOE-funded projects, some collaborative, some private, by providing each project with a secure space and the ability to fine-tune individual access controls. In response to user feedback, it now also features improved integration with DOE’s Geothermal Data Repository (GDR), to provide a clear and convenient pathway from collaboration to publication, and to register collaborative data projects with well-known data registries like Data.gov and the National Geothermal Data System (NGDS). This paper will explore how recent concerns raised by data-centric, proprietary projects have informed development on the Data Foundry and highlight improvements designed to streamline workflows, improve access control, and promote the timely dissemination of information to the geothermal industry.

Data Foundry↗