Challenges and Approaches for a Trustworthy Smart Grid Infrastructure
Abstract:
The vision for a modernized “Smart Grid” involves the use of an advanced computing, communication and control cyber infrastructure for enhancing current grid operations by enabling timely interactions among a range of entities. The coupling between the power grid and its cyber infrastructure is inherent, and the extent to which the Smart Grid vision can be achieved depends upon the functionality and robustness of the cyber infrastructure.
This talk describes some of the research underway at the DOE- and DHS-funded Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center which is aimed at ensuring that the power grid cyber infrastructure is protected both from accidental failures and malicious attacks from adversaries ranging from casual hackers to nation states. The goal of TCIPG is to provide resilience in the nation¹s electric grid cyber infrastructure such that it continues to deliver electricity and maintain critical operations even in the presence of cyber attacks. Achieving this goal will involve the extension, integration, design, and development of IT technologies imbibed with key properties of real-time availability, integrity, authentication and confidentiality. These results are being evaluated evaluated in a large-scale testbed with unique capabilities comprising real power system hardware and software as well as advanced simulation and emulation capabilities.
Biography:
William H. Sanders is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering and the Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (csl.illinois.edu) and the founding director of the Information Trust Institute(iti.illinois.edu) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, and past Vice-Chair of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing.
Prof. Sanders’s research interests include secure and dependable computing and security and dependability metrics and evaluation, with a focus on critical infrastructures. He has published more than 200 technical papers in those areas. He is currently the Director and PI of the DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center (www.tcipg.org), which is at the forefront of national efforts to make the U.S. power grid smart and resilient. He is also a member of the NIST Smart Grid Advisory Committee which advises the NIST Director on the direction of NIST’s Smart Grid-related programs and activities.
He is also co-developer of three tools for assessing computer-based systems: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. Möbius and UltraSAN have been distributed widely to industry and academia; more than 500 licenses for the tools have been issued to universities, companies, and NASA for evaluating the performance, dependability, and security of a variety of systems. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector, the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications, and the NetAPT (Network Access Policy Tool) for assessing the security of networked systems.