Abstract

Smart meters with enhanced capabilities of communication and control will contribute to adapt and tune energy delivery more efficiently. The road from a closed system to a highly complex interconnected ecosystem as the smart grids was driven by efficiency and resiliency. Now we require smart grids to be more cyber resilient, prepared to face the approaching cyber threats. Today’s trends situate risk management in the core of cybersecurity strategies: identification of threats, risk analysis on the potential impact on the assets, implementation of countermeasures, and tuning or establishing new security controls for better threat detection. The majority of the cyber threats include exploiting some vulnerability of the system, and new vulnerabilities are appearing, almost every day, specially favored by the increasing complexity and fast life cycles of firmware and software. That explains why vulnerability assessments require smart grid operator involvement, even with the help of vendors and manufacturers and the certification processes. The MAGOS project aims at helping operators to build secure environments where vulnerability assessments can be performed at lower costs, minimizing the exposure of system elements to faults and cyber threats. The MAGOS project will research on such testing environments, and will also research different security, privacy and performance aspects of protocols, networks and systems related to smart grids. Besides, there is a need to gather intelligence to help the risk assessment process, additive to the intelligence on consumption trends and predictions actually used by the operators to perform their planning operations. We aim at intelligence that can be found in open sources, from social networks, specialized blogs and sites, and data gathered by smart meters and other devices and systems, notably security information event monitoring systems (SIEMS) looking for information and comments that may be related to smart grid vulnerabilities and their corresponding exploits. A critical infrastructure such as the energy delivery system demands this intelligence to improve its readiness to execute the countermeasure processes. Multiple challenges appear to gather this intelligence preserving users’ privacy in a myriad of growing information. The MAGOS project will research on mining fusion and analysis techniques to discover and uncover knowledge for smart grid protection."

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