Leveraging Computational Grid Technologies for Building a Secure and Manageable Power Grid

Abstract

The US Power Industry is in the process of overhauling the Power Grid to make it more secure, reliable, and available. The IT systems that comprise a major part of this change need to address a number of security and management challenges for the data generated by power systems and for resources consumed by distributed applications. In this work we leverage the technologies developed by the Computational Grid to address these challenges. We identify striking similarities between the systems and use these similarities to suggest ways of addressing challenging problems; e.g., securing inter-control center communications and power grid infrastructures, and managing data and resources at control centers.

Optimization and Security Challenges in Smart Power Grids

“…Scaling such accesses requires federated approaches where the organizations agree on a common authentication and authorization system for accessing data and resources Intrusion detection (IEEE 2010b; Khurana et al 2007;Sugwon and Myongho 2010) • Organizations need to define security policies, deploy monitoring systems supported by advanced IDSs, and set up mechanisms for forensic analyses and development of a communication process to share incident data with other organizations and a response in a coordinated fashion Operational cost (IEEE 2010b) This chapter briefly surveyed the different standards for Smart Electric Grid.…”

“…We need to model faults and failures more accurately with respect to security incidents. To utilize this data several C-Grid techniques such as data federation, data virtualization and integration and data location services can be realized Load management (Khurana et al 2007) • Energy can be treated as a resource and its delivery to an appliance can be treated like a task. Constrained network and devices must also be considered Evolvability (IEEE 2010a; Khurana et al 2010) • The design should be modular, so that it can be easily upgraded later on with minimal disturbance to other components working properly Data management (Khurana et al 2007) • Managing and accessing large amount of energy usage and business related data at control center are challenging issues.…”

“…A detailed discussion and case study of such adaptations can be found at Khurana et al (2007). It is likely that many of these protocols will be based on customized versions of existing protocols, borrowed from other domains.…”

“…These limit conditions must be locally controlled and must not be remotely programmable • Hackers may gain unauthorized access to Smart Meters to manipulate its functionalities and make the grid unstable and cause financial loss • Extraction of data and encryption key from device memory was demonstrated Communication networks and links vulnerability(IEEE 2010a; INL 2009) • Most mesh networking protocols are based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard which is reported to be susceptible to a set of known types of attacks • As the vendors of wireless AMI technology are in a rush to develop and deploy market, security may not receive sufficient emphasis Key management (IEEE 2010a;Khurana et al 2007;Sugwon and Myongho 2010) Existing policies do not describe all possible scenarios • Government need to establish a national regimen for• General-purpose operating systems doing real time control is far riskier than well tested finite state machines implemented in special purpose hardware.…”

Representativeness models of systems: smart grid example

“…While executing a task, the status of ongoing jobs needs to be monitored for potential task scheduling conflicts and re-scheduling them if needed. A tricky issue in task scheduling is handling of irregular and time dependent performance of processors [22]. In addition to time dependency, an important scheduling issue is priority and sequence of object (e.g., power generator) execution.…”