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Blackout Cause: Buggy Code
blanca writes "The big northeast blackout from last summer was caused in part by a software bug in an energy managment system sold by General Electic, according to a story on SecurityFocus. The bug meant that a computerized alarm that should have been triggered never went off, hindering FirstEnergy's response to the train of events that lead to the cascading blackout. Investigators found the bug in a intensive code audit following the outage, and a patch is now available."
The first thing I saw at that site, "Reliable, Field-Proven & Adaptable". Funny.
Well, that statement is only half false, it's reliability has been field-proven.
Vonal Declosion
Didn't the story used to be that after a tech maintenenced the machine, he forgot to re-enable an alarm?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It's dark here, what about a bug?
"Patch available"
Phew! then at least i can patch my own power craft before anything happens!
Oh this bug took six months to find and now a patch is available. I thought someone said the bug was found six months ago and now the patch was available. My bad, nobody would ever do that :-)
With all the brainpower on Slashdot, I'm sure we can find a way!
i have been dreaming writting such a bug myself. quite an achievement to blackout quarter of a continent with some crappy code...
Aure entuluva!
Where's the URL, dude? I want to apply it to my local copy.
... when you outsource to the lowest bidder?
I've said enough.
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0312.html#1
A snippet of the article:
The term 'Software Engineering' is bantered about in the software industry. I think little that you could call engineering happens. Software is developed. It doesn't meet the strict standards of testing and reliability of physical products.
I am a software developer not an engineer, as are most people in the field. Software won't become an engineering science until companies are willing to pay for that process. Given the current trend towards cost cutting I don't see that happening anytime soon.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Just a question for everyone here:
Who thinks this could have been any better with Open Source and why?
People make the comment of the many eyes, but who is really looking at the code?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
I thought the Canadians did it?
Disclaimer: This opinion was created without the use of any facts
the XA/21 system has improved utilities' bottom lines
...
Who knows, perhaps it was only the overhead lines that went dead
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Chalk up another one for the most disasterous software bugs in history. This one should give the Ariane 5 explosion a go for no 1.
I'm waiting for the next big power failure, then the excuses about why the patch was never applied. :)
One code to light it all, ...
One coder to code it,
One debugger to miss the bug
and into the darkness lead them.
With all the lip service about "homeland security," one ought to be concerned about anything affecting national infrastructure being sent abroad where you really don't know who is doing the coding, whether the coding projects are being further outsorced to say alQaidaSoft, etc.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
"Things are so compliated, we don't know that a small event, or series of small events won't bring down the whole system"
Yeah, well I don't know that I won't be fired tomorrow for reading Slashdot at work, but that doesn't mean that I will.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
But is anyone else thinking of Medal of Honor?
Sound zee alarm!!
That might be the case except that XA 21 is developed in melbourne (Fl.)
facts before hysteria thanks
How about the energy companies?
Certainly, the energy corporations must be somewhat culpable for not rigorously testing the software in the first place? It is not in the interest of a for-profit company to see to it that such systems are functioning correctly, as that cost will detract from the bottom line profit. Only when disaster strikes can they be goaded into looking into problems.
Stop corporate
Now if in fact this was buggy code, and if Software Engineers are in fact part of the engineering profession, then a professional body should be taking the engineer(s) to task. This would be the same thing that would take place in the event that a civil engineer signed off on faulty building plans. But smart money says no software "engineer" will get nailed.
A look at the software industry will show this to be the norm. And that is why there is such a problem with having people claiming the title of "software engineer". "Engineer" doesn't just mean having the technical savvy, it also means having a responsibility to the public for the use of that knowledge and being beholden to a professional body charged with ensuring you are held accountable.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
This is Slashdot! Isn't that supposed to say Microsoft? It's always Microsoft.
I was going to put a sig here, but I had already submitted the message.
if you read the article and other associated articles, you will realise that this bug did not *cause* the blackout, on it's own this bug would have had no effect on the continued power supply. However, the timing of the bug along with a number of other issues (which I wont repeat here, read the article for a clue!) all contributed.
From the article:
When a backup server kicked-in, it also failed, unable to handle the accumulation of unprocessed events that had queued up since the main system's failure. Because the system failed silently, FirstEnergy's operators were unaware for over an hour that they were looking at outdated information on the status of their portion of the power grid, according to the November report.
How in the world did they manage to build a system nearly completely dependant upon computers, and yet not know when they lost not just one, but two computers that monitored the system?
Homer: Don't turn off the computer! Don't turn off the computer! Don't turn off the computer!
"Click"
And yep, it runs on major critical systems, including energy systems and satellites.
Lean on it in the slightest and it will crash and burn with little chance for recovery. Tibco even says they don't test their own software (lack of docs lowers their liability). Press them for test results and they will offer you to pay them to test for you.
When a backup server kicked-in, it also failed, unable to handle the accumulation of unprocessed events that had queued up since the main system's failure.
Sounds like classic Tibco.
Blaming the black out on a software bug is a damn cop-out. The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid that can barely keep up with the current demand. Any major failure in the system can cause a cascading failure of the entire section of the grid. That is a horrible design. A software bug may have been the trigger but it is by no means the true cause.
The grid in the North East US is supplied by horribly inefficient and antiquated power lines that were struggling to keep up thirty years ago. That they are still in use today is an outright crime. There's also the issue of the operators of the lines generators trying to save a few bucks by cutting maintenance on equipment and facilities and cutting supervising staffs down to skeleton crews. It is much easier to fit "software bug" into a sound bite so the news media will stick with that. Unfortunately the real cause of the black out is not ever going to be patched and another blackout is as inevitable as this last one was. I hope next time a few more people will have invested in backup generators or some alternate form of power to keep from losing their business during a blackout.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If this isn't a call to take a closer look at the possibility of more widely using tools like Z and B to develop important software, I don't know what is.
Yes, they're difficult. Yes, they aren't likely to eliminate all bugs. BUT. They provide a much better chance (as I understand it - I'm not an expert) that what is designed is what actually gets implimented. That shifts the burden onto the design, but that's OK - that burden was always there. It just means that the design gets properly implimented, which is all that can reasonably be asked of the coding process.
Currently, again as I understand it, the life of a software program in development is a constant struggle by the developers to cope with ever changing demands of customers. I think if people want matters to improve the customers are going to have to come to grips with reality, take the time to sit down and think things through, and make all critical design decisions BEFORE the development process begins. More expensive up front? You bet. That's why I think companies should look at cooperative effort for this type of thing. Distribute the cost of developing one really good program across an industry. A lot of the same core functionality can likely be shared between businesses - if they all pay for one proper design and implimentation of an open program up front, and they all get copies of the logic and proof code with rights to extend as they see fit, they all benefit. They can also open up the more general parts of the package to the world at large under GPL, and anyone could contribute who can generate valid B and Z designs/proofs. Sort of an "academic" open source code development forum - peer review and all. The companies get the benefit of all new development - if they are using it internally they can extend the GPL code for themselves, so long as they don't distribute it. If they do distribute it, they can so so under GPL for everyone to enhance. A plugin based model can also allow them to develop components to the system they can sell as commercial software, if they wish.
Whether this would work/appeal with corporate thinking I have no idea - many of those folks seem to view cooperation like the plague. But it might allow a higher grade of software to be developed and universally used, and I have a hard time imagining how that could be a bad thing for anyone.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons to me :)
Given my personal experience with this certain Fortune 5 company and software development as a whole, I am not surprised.
The bottom line is that there is soooo much software developed here by non-computer programmers. There are many great Engineers (Mechanical, Aerospace, etc.) here, yet very few can write good code. Many of them are asked to write code nonetheless and thanks to the travesty that is Visual Basic and other Rapid Application Development tools the code that is produced is extremely un-maintainable.
Then you have the matter of people moving jobs every 2 years and the poor bastard who has to maintain someone else's code gets lost inside of it.
Consider me very frustrated at the whole process.
No-one writes flawless code, not Sun, not IBM, and not even Linus or Alan Cox or Larry Wall. Anything that is controlled by code is bound to break, but that is why there are humans around and ways to override systems.
Regardless, First Energy had many, many ways to know something was up (whether it was MISO calling them, the general disruption they had before it could cascade) but they refused to take the necessary actions and close themselves off from the grid.
I bet they had much wider safety margins built into the system which prevented blackouts. But these safety margins probably cost money ( I say this without knowing a thing about the electrical system ) they probably mean a less efficient use of resources. So power companies buy GE's software. They don't buy it so that they can have an added measure of blackout prevention, they buy it because it enables them to cut out expensive/inefficient safety margins without (supposedly) sacrificing reliability. They do this to lower their cost of providing electricity to you.
Eat at Joe's.
and yes, there is no reason that a 12" tree should be anywhere CLOSE to a 50 MV line.
Rather, there is no reason that a 50 MV line should be anywhere close to a 12" tree.
To me, this report give a good example of why a monolithic (monocultural) dispatching system is not a good idea. If every transaction were controlled by a central center, a single software bug could shut down the entire North American grid.
sPh
Based on the PDF for the XA/21 system, it sounds like this wasn't related to some of the DCOM/OPC issues many (myself included) were speculating about. Thoough it's a SCADA control system (where Windows is common, though not universal), it's running on AIX (IBM or Motorola) or Solaris.
Interestingly enough, the sales literature describes it as having, "[an] established track record of field performance - over one million hours of online operation."
I wonder if they'll revise the brochure now?
Tim
Finally! The Y2K bug bit....
Oh wait..
Finally! The Y2K + 3 years, 8 months bug bit!
See? All those powdered eggs and shotgun shells paid off.
Hushed voice in my head: (PSST! The power was only out for a day or so)
Uhhhhh, nevermind.
WTF? Over?
By my calculations, assuming air ionizes about 10,000 Volts / centimeter, a 50MV line should be at least 5,000 cm (or 50 meters) from any ground. 50 meters on either side of a line is a lot of property for an electical company to buy, and with a surge in the line I'd bet the distance would need to be even more.
In all fairness...
The Mars Rover's software crashed in just a few days.
Virtually all software should be designed and tested better than it is.
However, I'm perplexed at why the Mars Rover failure and resurrection is considered a miracle of human inginuity, rather than an indictment of crummy testing.
I'll not excuse the power grid software either; but it seems to work more reliably than the software on the Rover.
Well, I have news for you: 50MV lines don't exist! Not out in the open, anyway. Was it 50 kV, perchance?
what good is a backup system if it's never been tested?
If she floats, she's a witch.
The software handled one part of the electrical system involved.
What about a good Electrical/Mechanical/Civil Engineering solution that would have prevented it from cascading through different systems / electrical companies / countries?
One piece of software which didn't raise an alarm is shocking. The fact that it cascaded over such a wide area is simply mind blowing.
Before we talk about "software engineers" how about talking about "traditional engineers" and their role in this massive failure?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
We may slam Microsoft for all of it's bugs, but it's really hard to top a software bug triggering an international blackout the size of one last summer. I think I should sue GE for making me walk 3.5 hours home in the heat with no money in Toronto, uphill, because I couldn't take a subway home. I smell a lawsuit the size of the eastern seaboard.
as described in the excellent work by Bruce Sterling, "The Hacker Crackdown" (which everyone probably read): the blackout of the AT&T telephone switching system in 1990 also occured because of a software error.
What happened then (accusing of hackers as being responsible) is happening again: people pointing to external factors as being the cause for the culprit.
When do people start to learn from mistakes made and realize that instead of accusing people, they can better spend time in software audits?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
After lots of years as a developer, I realized that the engineering process that goes into other professions (for example, civil engineering) can't be applied to software. The reason is simple: software is many orders more complex. Software has many interdependencies between components, has many states, and it is subject to change every minute. It's very difficult to see ahead and provide APIs that fit all the needs, that's why we go back and change the damn thing. What does a civil engineer has to do ? he/she has to combine parts and test if they hold together. There are a lot of parts, but the general principles are a few and can be easily remembered...unlike software.
Furthermore, the tools we have for the job are inadequate. The programming languages are primitive. The debugging tools are dumb. The machines are not clever and strong enough to prove the mathematical theorems behind its program. We don't even learn these things in college...we learn how to use programming languages, but we don't learn how to program...but I seriously believe we will never learn how to program, because a program's complexity increases tenfold for each line of code written!!!
...that presented itself in the AT&T software is told at the end of the chapter, repeated here for your convenience:
"As it happened, the problem itself - the problem per se - took this form. A piece of telco software had been written in C language, a standard language of the telco field. Within the C software was a long "do... while" construct. The "do... while" construct contained a "switch" statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if" clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break" was supposed to "break" the "if" clause. Instead, the "break" broke the "switch" statement."
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I'm sure this was mentioned in the original blackout posts - since the Blaster virus was running full tilt at that time, there was an increased load on servers, routers, switches, hubs and blinky things that go whoop! whoop!! WHOOOOP! The increased demand on computing resources caused increased power demand (not to mention the cranked ACs at the homes of the poor IT staff who were staring at their blackberrys and sweating bullets) which in turn caused the alarm conditions which didn't get alarmed properly and so the powergrid went down. All because of an MS security hole.
How's that?
Silly person. You didn't read the EULA on that software before clicking install. There is no warranty or guarantee that the software will even do what it claims to do let alone furction correctly in any way. You waive all right to hold the company responsible.
"I am not a number! I am a free man!"-- The Prisoner
So the software didn't raise alarms as it should've. That's bad. But it seems to me that the software is being made a scape goat here. It's much easier to blame "that #$@&@$ computer" than "FirstEnergy's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines" or the fact that the infrastructure for the powergrid is old and poorly setup such that one failure can bring down the whole system. There's no reason why a failure in Ohio should blackout New York and there's nothing software can do to fix that.
Oh mgod, we better stop outsourcing our precious programming jobs to Florida!
It is unpatriotic to move them from California, where they belong! I bet they pay the people in Florida a lot less.
(This is a joke)
They accepted more frequent but more localized power outages. Rural electric service didn't become available in our area until 1926 and four decades later you could still safely predict it would go down in a storm.
Snippet from the top of the file in question // Copyright (c) SCO group, Inc.
Now, where's thet $699 they owe?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Part of the class was dedicated to ensuring that we learned from the mistakes of the past. They showed us the video of the infamous Takoma Narrows bridge, and several other engineering mishaps. I was a computer science major and most, if not all, of the examples shown in the class, as far as I can remember, were engineering mishaps. I think this is a great example that can be now be added to the list of infamous engineering slip ups. This is a particularly good example for computer science majors, it shows that yes, you really do need good testing, and yes, major disasters can be caused by as little as one line of bad code.
I always wondered why we CS majors had to sit through that class, but here's a great example why.
...If programming is so complex, then why don't we try something new. You want a program without state? Try Haskell. You want to be able to prove something about your program? Try ML. But don't despair, I think the reason for crummy software is that it hasn't been around for that long. Civil engineers have had the hindsight of building roads, and aqueducts, and buildings for thousands of years. Software been around for what, 2 generations?
So what? You use a cell phone, don't you? The electrical energy exposure you get from that is substantially greater.
How about electric blankets or heating pads? How about a battery powered shaver?
You expose yourself to these fields every day to an extent far greater than what you may have received from that transmission line.
By the way, you can light a neon light with a bit of wire and very little power. You can also light it with a MW AM broadcast transmitter less than a mile away; you can light it with a CB radio; and with just a bit more wire, and a location closer to the poles of the earth, you can light it when the earth is hit by a solar flare. Many among the various eco-scare-monger groups like to make this demonstration as if it were an indicator of something dangerous. If it were, there would be no life anywhere near the Arctic Circle.
Aside of the poor maintainance for the clear-cut area, you really have no need to be concerned about this.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Had this been a Windows-based system, the torrent of comments about how unreliable the OS and platform fundementally was would be huge.
Funny, just because this ships for "industrial strength" AIX / Solaris RISC systems (see specs on pg 8), I don't see any cheap, reflexive comments about the platform.
I guess the message here is that good or bad code can be written for any architecture.
I always treat watchdog software with just a bit of skepticism. The problem, as pointed out by NERC, was that a process in the system was somehow present, but not communicating well.
The alarm subsystem is often a seperate process. It doesn't talk to the field. That's the job for other elements of the SCADA system. It was supposed to watch for semaphores, messages, or read shared memory somewhere. How do you watchdog something like that if it gets the message, but doesn't do what it's supposed to?
In a SCADA system near and dear to my career, we set alarm thresholds so low that the operators expect a certain amount of alarm traffic even for routine events. This helps to discover any misbehavior in the alarm system.
There is such a thing as a control center which is TOO quiet.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
After looking at the original report, it looks more like the GE XA21 SCADA network failure was not the primary cause of the cascading failure but more an effect of the failure. The key failure seems to be a software system callled the "State Estimator" (SE) that is used by the Midwest System Operator (MISO), a NERC reliability coordinator, to develop optimal solutions of for the planned operating level of all of the power generation and transmission equipment in the MISO area covering about 10 midwest states and 1 million square miles. It is not described in much detail but the SE seems to be an optimization tool using a linear programming model that gathers availability data for all of the major system components and load demand every five minutes and then calculates the 'optimal' use of those system components to maintain system reliability at the required level. The 'solution' of the model is then used to plan the operation of the overall system by sending the target operating levels to each facility in the system. So why did it fail? Two reasons. First, the model depends on having accurate availability information from each major system component. Status information is sent to MISO in Indiana by the "ECAR" data netork or by direct links. On the day of the failure, the direct link to a key transmission line was not working and the analyst had turned off the estimator to troubleshoot it. After fixing the problem, he went to lunch and forgot to put the system back in automatic mode where it would develop updated solutions. This situation existed for 2 hours from 12:15 to 14:40. When the estimator was switched back to automatic, it was unable to develop a solution because another key transmission line had overloaded and tripped and *its* new non-operational status was unknown to the model, apparently because the status of that line is assumed to be 'on' until told otherwise. This problem was not corrected until 16:04. The bottom line is that a critical major planning tool was not available for 4 hours for a regional generation and distribution system that absolutely required it's use to be operated successfully when the system power supply was very close to the demand.
The SCADA system itself did not fail, but its alarm function did, which provides alarms to control room operators about system operational problems. The problem with the alarm function seems to be a case of too many alarms for the system to handle as the problems multiplied. The software bug that they are now reporting was probably related to the unexpectedly large number of alarms that the system was experiencing. The new alarm inputs built up and then overflowed the process input buffers. The alarm system just stalled while processing an alarm event and the alarm function stopped. Then, at 14:41 the primary server hosting the alarm processing application failed due to some combination of the stalling of the alarm application and the queueing to the remote terminals. The hapless backup server then was automatically activated and everything was was transferred to it, even the functional non-alarm stuff. The backup server failed after 13 minutes. Basically, the SCADA alarm system seems to have been massively overloaded (which shouldn't ever happen, of course) beyond the capability of the system design to cope with. The bug apparently prevented an indication that the alarm system was failing but it looks like the cascading failure still would have occurred even if the software bug had not been present because the system deterioration had progressed to far to recover by the time that the bug manifested itself.
The immediate cause of the failure seems to be the forgetfulness of the analyst who was operating the planning model. The significant underlying contributory cause seems to be a very poor regional operational design in which a critical centralized system planning tool was being used with insufficient backup and oversight. It looks as though both Unix and Windows escape blame. The SCADA system probably was doing far more than it's designers intended and probably performed heroically until it died. 'Aye Captain...I canna do no more.'
In the case of the electric blankets, you're not exposing yourself to a lot of any B or H fields- there's not enough current present to generate much. Now, if you'd said something like a hair dryer, where the field is concentrated to power the motor...
The phone may generate more relative power, but it's at a different frequency- in regards to electricity and the human body, frequency matters as much as anything else.
For DC, 10ma of current may not be noticable to a person.
For 50/60Hz AC, it's going to cause a twitching of the muscles.
For DC 100ma to 1a of current, you're going to get a zap similar in nature to sticking your tongue on a 9v battery, proportionate to the current in question.
For 50/60Hz AC, 100ma to 1a, it's going to be causing painful contractions of your muscles, and very probably stopping your heart outright if the conduction pathway crosses it.
There's been studies that tend to prove that even low energy densities of 50/60Hz AC can accelerate tumor growth- no studies have actually proven that they generate them though. Effects like the one mentioned tend to be caused more by continuous exposure than point exposure- so the low levels of the energy radiated by the high-tension lines may be a problem if you're next to them since it's a continuous background level sort of thing.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The clearance can narrow in some conditions. When the lines get hot, they expand and sag noticeably. Hot weather will do it, and so will high current.
Then, just when you most need the power, a tree that used to be at a just barely safe distance shorts the power line.
The high end for mainstream deployments, by the way, is 750 KV or 1 MV. Corona losses get really bad above that level.
Chalk one up for software again! First the Mars lander Spirit and now this! w007! 1337 programming!
Software: 2
Hardware: 0
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.