Biblio

While cyberattacks pose a relatively new challenge for power grid control systems, commercial cloud systems have needed to address similar threats for many years. However, technology and approaches developed for cloud systems do not necessarily transfer directly to the power grid, due to important differences between the two domains. We discuss our experience adapting intrusion-tolerant cloud technologies to the power domain and describe the challenges we have encountered and potential directions for overcoming those obstacles.

While there has been considerable research on making power grid Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems resilient to attacks, the problem of transitioning these technologies into deployed SCADA systems remains largely unaddressed. We describe our experience and lessons learned in deploying an intrusion-tolerant SCADA system in two realistic environments: a red team experiment in 2017 and a power plant test deployment in 2018. These experiences resulted in technical lessons related to developing an intrusion-tolerant system with a real deployable application, preparing a system for deployment in a hostile environment, and supporting protocol assumptions in that hostile environment. We also discuss some meta-lessons regarding the cultural aspects of transitioning academic research into practice in the power industry.