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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 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Formal Methods for Provably Secure Software and Firmware

This project addresses a gap observed in verifying the programming in embedded devices used in international arms control: namely verifying that embedded programming in an arms control device does exactly what it is supposed to do, no more and no less, every time without fail, and without disclosing unauthorized information accidentally or intentionally. In critical military, aerospace, and industrial safety systems this problem is sometimes addressed using formal methods (FM). This multi-year project seeks to identify formal methods toolsets useable in arms control regimes, with emphasis on applicability, ease of use, long term availability, and support.

formal methods, Arms Control Verification↗
DOE OSTI2025

SUNSet: The Software Understanding for National Security Dataset Repo

SAND2025-00511O SUNSet: The Software Understanding for National Security Dataset Repo serves as a repository for software understanding researchers to conduct systematic research in the field. It provides a platform for storing questions, answers, and scripts related to software programs, supporting research in software understanding. The repository is a nascent effort aimed at exploring the support needed by researchers and documenting how software understanding questions can be addressed using existing tools. The software consists of a simple database and front end interface for easy access and management of the stored information. 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.

Amon, Tod [Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Livermor↗
DOE OSTI2025

Advanced Transmission Technologies – GETs and HPCs Session 2: Advanced Power Flow Control and Transmission Topology Optimization

The INL TADA GETs Cohort Session 2, held on November 7, 2025, conducted in collaboration with ScottMadden, focused on two core Advanced Transmission Technologies (ATTs): Advanced Power Flow Control (APFC) and Transmission Topology Optimization (TTO). These technologies are pivotal in enhancing grid flexibility, reliability, and cybersecurity resilience. APFC, particularly through modular FACTS devices like Modular Static Synchronous Series Compensators (M-SSSCs), enables dynamic voltage injection to reroute power flows. The session highlighted the deployment benefits of APFC, such as rapid installation, minimal civil works, and re-deployability. Regulatory drivers like FERC Order 2023 mandate the inclusion of Grid-Enhancing Technologies (GETs) in interconnection studies. Case studies from Central Hudson, CAISO, and National Grid (UK) demonstrated APFC’s effectiveness in congestion relief and cost savings. The session also addressed cybersecurity concerns, including firmware vulnerabilities, SCADA integration risks, and supply chain dependencies. Participants engaged in interactive exercises to rank cybersecurity and supply chain risks, emphasizing the need for robust digital assurance strategies. TTO involves software-based reconfiguration of transmission networks to optimize power flow without new infrastructure. The session showcased its operational value, with examples from SPP, PJM, and MISO showing significant congestion cost reductions. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities were discussed, particularly in API security and software supply chains, referencing incidents like SolarWinds and attacks on Danish utilities. Digital assurance exercises explored worst-case scenarios, attack paths, and mitigation responsibilities between vendors and utilities. Reliability challenges such as algorithm stability, vendor dependency, and operator trust were also examined. Cross-cutting themes emphasized the importance of digital assurance tools, including Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) and hardware-in-loop testing. Human performance, training, and operational confidence were identified as critical enablers of technology adoption. The session concluded with a preview of Session 3, which will focus on High Performance Conductors (HPCs) and risk-based cybersecurity tools. Session 2 of 3.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

The Elastic Analysis Facility's (EAF's) Contribution to the Future of Analysis at Multi-Experiment Institutions and Future Colliders

The Elastic Analysis Facility (EAF) hosted at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) is a platform being developed with the goal of providing a fast and efficient facility for physics analysis. As high-energy physics moves towards collecting larger datasets, such as those from the High-Luminosity LHC, the EAF strives to provide a powerful and adaptable framework for future colliders and multi-experiment institutions. Currently, the EAF supports several experiments including CMS, NOvA, and DUNE as well as serving accelerator physicists and beam line operations through integrated software and secure connections to Fermilab's computing resources. In addition, the EAF was designed with a user-friendly interface, intended to be more intuitive for emerging generations of physicists, that is still accessible for established styles of analysis. The EAF can also achieve better analysis efficiency due to the modernization of software and tools that can better utilize Fermilab's computing power. Furthermore, its design incorporates industry standards whenever possible, enhancing its sustainability and making it a possible template for other national or international laboratories and research facilities. Overall, the EAF is a forward-looking solution that will meet the evolving needs of particle physics, ensuring readiness for future colliders and multi-experiment research institutions.

Chavez, Elise [Wisconsin U., Madison]↗
DOE OSTI2024

Network Security Challenges and Countermeasures for Software-Defined Smart Grids: A Survey

The rise of grid modernization has been prompted by the escalating demand for power, the deteriorating state of infrastructure, and the growing concern regarding the reliability of electric utilities. The smart grid encompasses recent advancements in electronics, technology, telecommunications, and computer capabilities. Smart grid telecommunication frameworks provide bidirectional communication to facilitate grid operations. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a proposed approach for monitoring and regulating telecommunication networks, which allows for enhanced visibility, control, and security in smart grid systems. Nevertheless, the integration of telecommunications infrastructure exposes smart grid networks to potential cyberattacks. Unauthorized individuals may exploit unauthorized access to intercept communications, introduce fabricated data into system measurements, overwhelm communication channels with false data packets, or attack centralized controllers to disable network control. An ongoing, thorough examination of cyber attacks and protection strategies for smart grid networks is essential due to the ever-changing nature of these threats. Previous surveys on smart grid security lack modern methodologies and, to the best of our knowledge, most, if not all, focus on only one sort of attack or protection. This survey examines the most recent security techniques, simultaneous multi-pronged cyber attacks, and defense utilities in order to address the challenges of future SDN smart grid research. The objective is to identify future research requirements, describe the existing security challenges, and highlight emerging threats and their potential impact on the deployment of software-defined smart grid (SD-SG).

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Converged Computing: A Best of Both Worlds of High-Performance Computing and Cloud

Collaboration between Cloud and High Performance Computing (HPC) communities has accelerated in the last half decade. A common goal to run batch workloads combined with a desire for reproducibility, automation, and optimization has led to successful projects that range from container technologies to workload management and security. This span of current and future work defines a novel “Converged Computing” paradigm that aims to combine the best of both worlds, both from a technological and cultural standpoint. Furthermore, in this Special Issue, we review common themes in the space, showcasing current work and encouraging a continued effort toward innovative ideas that will enable the next generations of scientific discovery.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Energy Supply Security Index (eesi) v0.1.0

This software computes different metrics that quantify energy supply security. It computes metrics for the amount of energy self-production, autonomy, system adequacy, self-sufficiency and autarky. The software has been developed to compute metrics that are introduced in a journal manuscript, and the software is intended to be published to make the underlying metric calculation accessible and reproducible to the reader of the article. Potential use of the software is for policymakers, energy planners and researchers to guide energy system infrastructure decisions.

Sulzer, Matthias [Swiss Federal Laboratories for M↗
DOE OSTI2025

Abbreviated Report for 25-FS-011: Switch and Stitch Similar Subgraph Synthesizer

Government institutions utilize software from a wide array of development sources, including those written by large software companies, government contractors, and open-source repositories. Avoiding installation of malicious software components is an important national security endeavor. Automated analysis of previously unseen software is an active research area, and there is much research in the design of systems that compare new software artifacts to a large set of previously seen software records organized by various behaviors they contain. One attractive approach is to turn each compiled software binary into a graph representation and apply a graph similarity model that scores pairs of binaries by their relative similarity. When a pair is deemed similar, it is useful to know why, in the sense of providing explanations to security analysts regarding which portions of the software they should look into further.

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

Deciphering Discrepancies: A Comparative Analysis of Docker Image Security

As the use of microservices continues to grow and become a foundational approach to architecting software solutions, ensuring the security of microservices is paramount. Docker images have emerged as the predominant solution to containerize microservices–and thus, Docker images are becoming a large attack surface. Thus, reducing vulnerabilities in Docker images will reduce microservice cyberattacks. A common way to find vulnerabilities in Docker images employs static analysis tools like Trivy and Grype. However, these tools frequently generate disparate vulnerability reports when analyzing the same Docker image, thus causing uncertainty in tool selection. We collected 927 Docker images, analyzed them with Trivy and Grype, and compared the vulnerabilities reported in each image. Among the 865 images found to have vulnerabilities, Trivy and Grype disagreed on both the number of vulnerabilities and the vulnerability IDs found therein. Since both tools interface with external vulnerability databases, some discrepancies can be attributed to how the tools interface with these external resources. The external vulnerability databases partially overlap and frequently contradict one another, thereby creating challenges for static analysis tool developers and end users alike. This New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) study contains new and critical information that practitioners need for selecting and using static analysis tools–given that increases in the use of Docker technologies means increases in the size of the attack surfaces.

Boles, Brittany [Montana State University]↗
DOE OSTI2024

Cybersecurity Certification Requirements for Distributed Energy Resources: A Survey of SunSpec Alliance Standards

This survey paper explores the cybersecurity certification requirements defined by the SunSpec Alliance for Distributed Energy Resource (DER) devices, focusing on aspects such as software updates, device communications, authentication mechanisms, device security, logging, and test procedures. The SunSpec cybersecurity standards mandate support for remote and automated software updates, secure communication protocols, stringent authentication practices, and robust logging mechanisms to ensure operational integrity. Furthermore, the paper discusses the implementation of the SAE J3072 standard using the IEEE 2030.5 protocol, emphasizing the secure interactions between electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) for functionalities like vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities. This research also examines the SunSpec Modbus standard, which enhances the interoperability among DER system components, facilitating compliance with grid interconnection standards. This paper also analyzes the existing SunSpec Device Information Models, which standardize data exchange formats for DER systems across communication interfaces. Finally, this paper concludes with a detailed discussion of the energy storage cybersecurity specification and the blockchain cybersecurity requirements as proposed by SunSpec Alliance.

Tsikteris, Sean (ORCID:0009000524202250)↗
DOE OSTI2024

Hardware Fuzzing with An Emulator

Bugs in digital logic have led to some significant security vulnerabilities. Hardware bugs are particularly troublesome since they cannot be easily patched. Additionally, if the bug is in the root of trust, all trust built upon it can be vulnerable. Traditional testing either require a deep knowledge of the system, creative attack vectors and lots of human interaction. This is not scalable as there are very few engineers that can wear the hat of a designer, a verification engineer, and a cybersecurity expert. Hardware fuzzing is a relatively new research area in dynamic hardware testing. It has proven to be an effective method for discovering bugs, unexpected behaviors, and security vulnerabilities in software. While hardware fuzzing is new to the hardware domain, it has a strong track record in software testing. Fuzzing is a testing technique that randomly mutates the input data to uncover bugs or vulnerabilities in the design. It is especially good at finding corner cases that test engineers can not envision. Another advantage over other dynamic testing techniques is that, if done well, deep knowledge of the design is not required. Additionally, fuzzing scales well. If the system is set up correctly, it can run unsupervised for weeks if necessary. In this work, we propose using hardware fuzzing to improve the input vector generation for an information flow tracking tool. To get reasonable throughput of test vectors, an emulator is targeted as the execution platform. Efficient emulator execution has some specific requirements.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2026

CyTRICS™ Assessment Report: Whole Home Battery Applications

This report examines the software supply chain security posture of mobile applications developed for consumer whole-house battery and energy-management products. While these applications are not currently integrated with critical infrastructure, their growing role in connected energy domain spaces underscores the importance of understanding the external dependencies, permission structures, and runtime behaviors that could introduce systemic risk; particularly, if adoption expands into more critical environments.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2025

FAIR Ecosystems for Science at Scale

High Performance Computing (HPC) centers provide resources to users who require greater scale to “get science done”. They deploy infrastructure with singular hardware architectures, cutting-edge software environments, and stricter security measures as compared with users’ own resources. As a result, users often create and configure digital artifacts in ways that are specialized for the unique infrastructure at a given HPC center. Each user of that center will face similar challenges as they develop specialized solutions to take full advantages of the center’s resources, potentially resulting in significant duplication of effort. Much duplicated effort could be avoided, however, if users of these centers found it easier to discover others’ solutions and artifacts as well as share their own. The FAIR principles address this problem by presenting guidelines focused around metadata practices to be implemented by vaguely defined “communities”; in practice, these tend to gather by domain (e.g. bioinformatics, geosciences, agriculture). Domain-based communities can unfortunately end up functioning as silos that tend both to inhibit sharing of solutions and best practices as well as to encourage fragile and unsustainable improvised solutions in the absence of best-practice guidance. We propose that these communities pursuing “science at scale” be nurtured both individually and collectively by HPC centers so that users can take advantage of shared challenges across disciplines and potentially across HPC centers. We describe an architecture based on the EOSC-Life FAIR Workflows Collaboratory, specialized for use with and inside HPC centers such as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), and we speculate on user incentives to encourage adoption. We note that a focus on FAIR workflow components rather than FAIR workflows is more likely to benefit the users of HPC centers.

Wilkinson, Sean [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000214437479)↗
DOE OSTI2025

Designing FAIR Workflows at OLCF: Building Scalable and Reusable Ecosystems for HPC Science

High Performance Computing (HPC) centers, such as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), provide advanced infrastructure that enables scientific research at extreme scale. These centers operate with unique hardware configurations, specialized software environments, and elevated security re quirements that differ substantially from what most users encounter on their local systems. As a result, users often develop customized digital artifacts that are tightly coupled to the specific configuration of a given HPC center. Although necessary, this practice can lead to significant duplication of effort as multiple users independently create similar solutions to common problems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Innovating the next generation of commercial smart building software

Nearly 30% of commercial building energy use is wasted due to equipment faults and HVAC controls problems. The result is increased emissions, compromised comfort and productivity, and less reliable coordination of building power needs with a clean grid. The energy impact alone represents $17 billion in potential savings. Today’s smart building software provides a robust solution to address these operational deficiencies. Energy management and information systems (EMIS) are saving up to 9% on average, with two-year paybacks. They are being incorporated into energy management processes, commissioning services, and utility programs. As effective as they are, two barriers prevent even deeper benefits; limited personnel to fix problems once they are identified, and the expense and time to manually implement changes in control systems. In partnership with the research community, the EMIS industry is developing new capabilities to overcome these barriers. Moving beyond siloed products for either fault detection and diagnostics, or optimal control, these new capabilities empower users to not only automatically identify faults, but also to push corrective action, and control improvements to their buildings. In this paper, several areas for enhancements are documented: ‘one-time’ correction of faults such as setpoints, schedules, and economizer lockouts; short-term active testing for automated proportional integral derivative (PID) loop tuning and functional testing; and continuous supervisory control for demand flexibility and year-round efficiency. Results are presented from a pair of partner implementations out of a dozen providers integrating these enhancements into their products, including field tests from across the country, and insights into operator acceptance and integration into operations and maintenance practices.

Casillas, Armando↗
DOE OSTI2024

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Science: Challenges and Research Directions

This paper discusses the key challenges and future research directions for privacy-preserving federated learning (PPFL), with a focus on its application to large-scale scientific AI models, in particular, foundation models~(FMs). PPFL enables collaborative model training across distributed datasets while preserving privacy-- an important collaborative approach for science. We discuss the need for efficient and scalable algorithms to address the increasing complexity of FMs, particularly when dealing with heterogeneous clients. In addition, we underscore the need for developing advance privacy-preserving techniques, such as differential privacy, to balance privacy and utility in large FMs emphasizing fairness and incentive mechanisms to ensure equitable participation among heterogeneous clients. Finally, we emphasize the need for a robust software stack supporting scalable and secure PPFL deployments across multiple high-performance computing facilities. We envision that PPFL would play a crucial role to advance scientific discovery and enable large-scale, privacy-aware collaborations across science domains.

Kim, Kibaek [Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)]↗
DOE OSTI2024

IRI Technology Landscape – A survey of re-usable components and methodologies

This document describes technical implementation details on network access schemes connecting API-driven workflows to supercomputer centers. API-driven workflows are a central theme in connected computing, since they bring the terminal-mainframe' access pattern present since the 1970s up to the task of interfacing with modern web browser technologies. Both security (HTTPS/TLS/IPSec/VPNs/public key cryptography/digital signatures) and network protocol stacks (HTTP-REST APIs, tokens, gRPC, SRTP) have evolved to the point where implementing API-driven workflows is possible using stable, secure off-the-shelf software.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Towards Automated Assessment of Vulnerability Exposures in Security Operations

Current approaches for risk analysis of software vulnerabilities using manual assessment and numeric scoring do not complete fast enough to keep pace with the maintenance work rate to patch and mitigate the vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a new approach to modeling software vulnerability risk in the context of the network environment and firewall configuration. In the approach, vulnerability features are automatically matched up with networking, target asset, and adversary features to determine whether adversaries can exploit a vulnerability. The ability of adversaries to reach a vulnerability is modeled by automatically identifying the network services associated with vulnerabilities through a pipeline of machine learning and natural language processing and automatically analyzing network reachability. Our results show that the pipeline can identify network services accurately. We also find that only a small number of vulnerabilities pose real risks to a system. However, if left unmitigated, adversarial reach to vulnerabilities may extend to nullify the effect of firewall countermeasures.

Huff, Philip↗