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/ Journal Issues / Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition / The Efficacy and Challenges of SCADA and Smart Grid Integration

The Efficacy and Challenges of SCADA and Smart Grid Integration

Published in Journal of Cyber Security and Information Systems
Volume: 1 Number: 3 - Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

Authors: Les Cardwell and Annie Shebanow
Posted: 02/10/2016 | Leave a Comment

Security Integration Improvement – Addressing Cybersecurity Risks

A posit by Langner and Pederson (2013) suggests that putting emphasis on establishing frameworks for risk management, and relying on voluntary participation of the private sector that owns and operates the majority of US critical infrastructure are together a recipe for continued failure. The reason for this is the reliance on the concept of risk management framed as a problem in business logic, which ultimately allows the private sector to argue the hypothetical risk away. The authors suggest that a policy-based approach (vs. a risk-assessment based approach) that sets clear guidelines would avoid perpetuating the problem. They also argue the distinction between a critical and a non-critical systems only contradicts pervasiveness and sustainability of the effort in arriving at robust and well-protected systems.

As was recently asserted by Cardwell (2013) in response to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) “RFI – Framework for Reducing Cyber Risks to Critical Infrastructure” driven by the recent Executive Order “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity” (NIST, 2013), the “…issue is the ‘expanding redundant complexity’ of the current approach to the problem domain. While one can appreciate the efforts in gathering more information from the industry at large for establishing and improving frameworks to raise the overall level of cybersecurity across the utility industry, the problem is that it does not address the inherent complexity of the problem. It only exacerbates it by creating yet more administrative requirements for decomposing and resolving the problem domain for each utility.”

Rather than asking every utility to wade through every applicable (to that utility) standard, recommendation, and framework, the assertion suggests that a “single-source” methodology that eliminates redundancy across all frameworks be adopted and provided for addressing the complexity and achieving a Digital Systems Security (DSS) Cybersecurity standard across the US Utility spectrum. Using a single-source tool as litmus, the outcome is a reduction in administrative and redundant efforts otherwise required to manage the information between multiple systems, and serves as a living digital document of the DSS domain, thus simplifying the process further.

One such tool does currently exist: the Cyber Security Evaluation Tool (CSET) (DHS, 2011) by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), although improvements are still being applied to improve its efficacy. Even with such an application, while the process is certainly not “easy” for any utility, it is relatively simple in comparison to wading through all the various requirements and recommendations, hoping to achieve a full decomposition of each. Simplifying the DSS Cybersecurity process in this fashion will save utilities—both individually and collectively—significant amounts of time, and resources, and could galvanize the DSS efforts for both the regulatory bodies and the utility industry combined.

While establishing such a tool as litmus for evaluating the level of DSS maturity for a given utility, some additional thought went into the subject using the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI Institute, 2010) to assist utilities in that effort. That effort resulted in a modified CMMI model labeled as the Electricity Subsector Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (DHS, 2012).

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References

Abawajy, J., & Robles, R. J. (2010). Secured Communication Scheme for SCADA in Smart Grid Environment. Journal of Security Engineering, 7(6), 12.

Balijepalli, V. S. K. M., Khaparde, S., Gupta, R., & Pradeep, Y. (2010). SmartGrid initiatives and power market in India.

Cardwell, L. (2013, February 28). Comments received in response to: Federal register notice developing a framework to improve critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Retrieved on April 10 fromhttp://csrc.nist.gov/cyberframework/rfi_comments/central_lincoln_pud_022...

Chauvenet, C., Tourancheau, B., Genon-Catalot, D., Goudet, P. E., & Pouillot, M. (2010). A communication stack over PLC for multi physical layer IPv6 Networking.

Clark, A., & Pavlovski, C. J. (2010). Wireless Networks for the Smart Energy Grid: Application Aware Networks. Proceedings of the International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists, 2.

CMMI Institute. (2010, November). Capability maturity model integration. Retrieved from http://cmmiinstitute.com/

Collier, S. E. (2010). Ten steps to a smarter grid. Industry Applications Magazine, IEEE, 16(2), 62-68.

DHS. (2011, January 24). Cyber security evaluation tool. Retrieved from http://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/satool.html

DHS. (2012, May 31). Electricity subsector cybersecurity capability maturity model. Retrieved fromhttp://energy.gov/oe/services/cybersecurity/electricity-subsector-cybers...

Fries, S., Hof, H. J., & Seewald, M. (2010). Enhancing IEC 62351 to Improve Security for Energy Automation in Smart Grid Environments.

Gervasi, O. (2010). Encryption scheme for secured Communication of web based control systems. Journal of Security Engineering, 7(6), 12.

Hentea, M. (2008). Improving security for SCADA control systems. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management, 3, 73-86.

Jha, R. K., Kumar, R. A., & Dalal, U. D. Performance Comparison of Intelligent Jamming in RF (Physical) Layer with WLAN Ethernet Router and WLAN Ethernet Bridge. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Advances in Communication, Network, and Computing.

Langner, R., & Pederson, P. (2013). Bound to fail: Why cyber security risk cannot simply be “managed” away. Retrieved on April 10 from http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/executive-order-im...

NIST. (2013, February 12). Cybersecurity framework. Retrieved from http://www.nist.gov/itl/cyberframework.cfm

Teixeira, A., Dán, G., Sandberg, H., & Johansson, K. H. (2010). A cyber security study of a SCADA energy management system: Stealthy deception attacks on the state estimator. Arxiv preprint arXiv:1011.1828.

Authors

Les Cardwell
Les Cardwell
Dr. Les Cardwell is an Enterprise Data Architect at Central Lincoln People’s Utility District on the Oregon Coast, one of the a recipients of the ARRA Smart Grid Grants. He received his doctorate (DCS-DSS) from Colorado Technical University, and received both a MIT and BIT from American InterContinental University. Les is a subject matter expert (SME) for the DOE’s Electric Subsector Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (ES-C2M2), is a Certified Enterprise Architect (EACOE), and an evangelist for solving the Cybersecurity challenges through an Enterprise Architecture perspective. His experience spans 30 years improving ICT efficiencies, with a passion for reducing complexity to its simplest form.
Annie Shebanow
Annie Shebanow
Annie Shebanow has a Doctorate degree in Computer Science and currently teaching at Brandeis University. She has over 20 years of software engineering and business leadership experience working for Apple, IBM, Cisco Systems, and several other companies. She has founded five Internet companies in the past, and currently, she is working on her next venture building a Cloud platform with teams in Colorado and Africa.

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