Data Storm Caused Nuclear Plant To Shut Down

rs232 writes to let us know that the US House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security called this week for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to further investigate the cause of excessive network traffic that shut down an Alabama nuclear plant. Investigators want to know whether the data storm could have been initiated from outside the plant.

Comments

Re: The reason?

[Clockworkalien]

All of the plant employees were looking up Starcraft 2 news.

Shut down?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Investigators want to know whether the data storm could have been initiated from outside the plant.

Do invesigators also want to know how a "data storm" could have caused a nuclear plant to shut down?

nothing to see, move along.

[SuperBanana]

Some choice quotes, emphasis added:

An investigation into the failure found that the controllers for the pumps locked up following a spike in data traffic -- referred to as a "data storm" in the NRC notice -- on the power plant's internal control system network. The deluge of data was apparently caused by a separate malfunctioning control device, known as a programmable logic controller (PLC).

"Conversations between the Homeland Security Committee staff and the NRC representatives suggest that it is possible that this incident could have come from outside the plant," Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Subcommittee Chairman James R. Langevin (D-RI) stated in the letter. "Unless and until the cause of the excessive network load can be explained, there is no way for either the licensee (power company) or the NRC to know that this was not an external distributed denial-of-service attack."

Wow. Just...wow. As if you needed more proof that this wasn't a hacking attempt:

"The integrated control system (ICS) network is not connected to the network outside the plant, but it is connected to a very large number of controllers and devices in the plant," Johnson said. "You can end up with a lot of information, and it appears to be more than it could handle."

Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to think "OMG, Haxxors?" Answer: work at Homeland inSecurity, or be a Congresscritter. They already figured it out. It was a controller for a specific piece of equipment that flooded the network and triggered a bug in the variable-frequency-drive controllers for pumps.

Re:nothing to see, move along.

[A Bugg]

I work at a nuke plant as a system engineer. One of my systems are the reactor recirculation pumps, these type of pumps. I know for a fact there is no way hackers could "data storm" my pumps and there is extreme doubt in my mind that the same thing could happen at Browns Ferry. The pumps digital control system isn't even near any outside network.

However, I will fully put the blame on the PLCs. Those little suckers come in handy but if you don't completely understand every line of code and every instruction they can f_ck you over.

I also love how they say "well if you can't prove it wasn't, then it must have been".

Re:nothing to see, move along.

[Anonymous Coward]

You just have to love Browns Ferry don't you? This is the same plant that had wired its control cabling for two nuclear reactors through the same area. Then they had workers check the air tightness by using candles near their flammable insulation. It wasn't air tight and the flame of a candle was sucked into the insulation. Thus a fire broke out, $100 million of damage occurred, and control was lost of their two nuclear reactors for something around 8 or more hours. Why 8 hours? Because their fire team tried to fight the fire with portable CO2 extinguishers. Yes, for 8 hours. Until the local fire department (which they previously obstructed) put it out with water in 5 minutes. Idiot designers and idiot employees. I'm surprised that plant didn't have a meltdown before TMI. But boiling water reactors are a little harder to destroy.

Standards!

[26199]

You'd hope that in something as critical as a nuclear power plant the answer would be, very quickly, "no, it didn't come from an external source because that's impossible". Followed by detailed analysis of the logs to determine which internal system screwed up.

That said, the article is a bit sparse on actual technical details, so my derision may be unwarranted.

Re:Standards!

[mrchaotica]

You'd hope that in something as critical as a nuclear power plant the answer would be, very quickly, "no, it didn't come from an external source because that's impossible".

Actually, power plants have to have a connection to the outside world. Why? Load-balancing for the power grid. If another plant goes down somewhere, this plant needs to know about it so that it can adjust output to compensate. For that, all the plants need to be hooked to a communications grid, which could conceivably be hacked (even though -- I would hope -- it's not connected to the Internet).

Re:Standards!

[Artifakt]

This actually can be avoided (and AFAIK current designs do). Fast, electronic level response to avoid blackouts and such requires very much less time than changing reactor output would either allow or facilitate anyway, so the direct machine to machine communication links don't really need to go to the power cycle control systems at all. Instead, rapid response grid balancing is done at external switchpoints. For the newer designs, these are outside the whole plant at substations, let alone just outside the core areas. Between these links and reactor control systems, there's supposed to always be an air gap.
        Given that, any hacking would have to include a social engineering element designed to fool the operators into making the wrong decisions. If we include that stipulation, yes, it's quite conceivable. If we postulate someone bridging the air gap, maybe by something as simple as hooking a laptop that also contains a wireless card into the control network, then a non-social engineering attack becomes conceivable, but not really otherwise.
        DOE and NRA doctrine is that adjusting reactor output based solely on a trigger event outside the core instrumentation is supposed to always require a high level human decision. Supervisors are also at least supposed to be trained to the point where they can make these decisions without adding any more response time than a conventional, (i.e. hydroelectric or coal based), plant would need for their human level decision events. (Yes they have them. For example the four TVA dams that supply Alcoa aluminum face a whole series of individual and joint human level decisions every time Alcoa's main furnace system glitches, and these have to include how long Alcoa expects them to need to dump power elsewhere, and for each of them, what options the other three dams are considering).
      The DOE does not legally presume that reactors are even as responsible for balancing the grid as conventional plants, but given how much older a lot of the conventional plants are, it's pretty easy to do much, much better than is strictly required, and it should be noted that, in the last New York blackout all the cascade effects and switching failures happened in 1940's era or earlier fossil fuel plants, and the worst points were 1930's or even 1920's era designs. Still, the rules are that if the conventional plants are failing at load balancing, even if the grid is experiencing severe cascade failures, the nuclear sites will let the whole thing crash rather than take the risks of trying to stabilize the grid by actually modulating their reactions.

Re:Standards!

[dbIII]

As one of those who would like to see hundreds of new nuke plants,

After some R&D and building some prototypes of promising new designs I'd be right with you - but our current best bets are things out of South Africa (pebble bed) and India (accelerated thorium) done on very small buidgets with very small teams and they need more work. The mainstream is just chasing taxpayer supplied pork. If they were after more than a handout they would be putting in some effort - instead they spend orders of magnitaude in PR, advertising and outright bribes than R&D.

As for costs - you can't just conveniently ignore capital costs. If you could hydro, wind, solar etc would win every time even in those places where it would be a stupid idea or where the capital costs are far too large for the return. Nuclear power is a possiblity in those places that have the infrastucture of a weapons program but everywhere else you would have to build up an entire industry from scratch. Iran is the best example currently where that is taking place and it has cost them a fortune to do so - hence few people think it is for purely civilian purposes there. In South Africa it was possible to take people from the weapons program to develop pebble bed. It is also far too big an investment for private enterprise - hence no new plants getting built while governments had cold feet on the issue and the "new generation" designs from companies like Westinghouse are just tweaked 1950s designs painted green.

You missed one....

[iknownuttin]

FTFA: "What is happening in this marketplace is that vendors will build their own (network) stacks to make it cheaper," Peterson said. "And it works, but when (the device) gets anything that it didn't expect, it will gag."

Sounds to me that the vendors under-engineered their network and still charged mega-bucks for it. The auditors, I'm sure, are making the most out of this to justify their fee.

Nothing to see, move along - I'll say!

Political FUD

[Bellum Aeternus]

As usual, the American government is looking to extend its control over things. "Oh noes, look what terrorists might have done. Homeland security needs more funding and less oversight to prevent this in the future." When will people learn to assume the government is lying first, then wait for them to prove themselves right later?

What network technology were they using?

[Angostura]

Isn't it a bit odd that they were using a non-deterministic network - something like Ethernet, by the sound of it. Back in the early 90s, I was always told that networks like Ethernet were great for office apps, but not where you wanted guaranteed times for message delivery. For that token ring, FDDI and the like were better. What is the network infrastructure of choice in a nuclear power station?

Even stupider

[packetmon]

After yet re-reading, I find this government even more insanely stupider than I would have hoped for... Such failures are common among PLC and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, because the manufacturers do not test the devices' handling of bad data, said Dale Peterson, CEO of industrial system security firm DigitalBond.

"What is happening in this marketplace is that vendors will build their own (network) stacks to make it cheaper," Peterson said. "And it works, but when (the device) gets anything that it didn't expect, it will gag." So you mean to tell me pretty much there is no enforcement for manufacturers to maintain compliance on their products even if those products are going into a nuclear *ANYTHING... Which on the worst case scenario could cause catastrophe, yet we have regulatory commissions on the flow of ketchup, regulatory commissions/directions/etc., on weight loss products, lipsticks, etc. (FDA), but this place is not concerned with nuclear plants. Sinful.

Re:Redesign the entire infrastructure

[mrcdeckard]

i think the fact that an unforeseen erroneous condition caused the plant to *shutdown* and not *meltdown* is a pretty good indication that it was designed quite well.

There will always be unforeseen situations. The key is for the system to shutdown in an orderly fashion. In programming, this is accomplished through use of error traps.

Now, the hysteria surrounding terrorism is another thing the plant engineers have to worry about.

i just wonder if and when we get to put this hysteria behind us, and get along with our lives. unfortunately, terry gilliam's brazil is on a constant loop in my mind these days. . . .

mr c

Re:No kidding

[StarfishOne]

Tor networks are generally not *that* fast.. so causing a data storm is not likely. ;)

Sometimes such connections are sooo slow, it makes users cry. They don't call it onion routing for nothing, eh? ;P

It's not stupid.

[twitter]

Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to think "OMG, Haxxors?" Answer: work at Homeland inSecurity, or be a Congresscritter. They already figured it out. It was a controller for a specific piece of equipment that flooded the network and triggered a bug in the variable-frequency-drive controllers for pumps.

As someone who used to work in system's engineering for a sister BWR, I think the inspection is a good idea. Oh, there's dumb and there's nuclear dumb but this is not a case of either. Nuclear dumb involves putting machine guns nests inside the plant. Finding the root cause of the accident is a good idea.

Handwaving about a PLC device won't do. What ultimately caused the PLC malfunction needs to be answered at a component level. There's going to be something wrong with it and that should be reported and every other device like it needs to be ripped out and trashed. If there is not component failure, there's a software problem which also must be understood.

Yes, it could have been hackers. The "internal control network" might at some point hits a desk that's connected to the wider world. It could be something mundane and unintentional, like an operator's virused up laptop.

An outage like that is something that's going to have both NRC and corporate ass-chewers looking at everything. Corporate might want to paint a nice picture for the NRC, but the poor devil that lies to them goes to jail. In either case, the problem will be identified and eliminated.

You might also have noted in the article that this is not the first plant to go thumbs down over some winblows born virus. In 2003, the slammer worm caused havoc at an offline Ohio plant. Yes, that was hackers. They did not mean to do it, but the plant's systems were open to it and failed. That's not acceptable from any standpoint.

Despite the better advice of the computer people at the plants, Entergy is a big M$ Partner. They take the big dogs out fishing and sell them the works. Ten years ago, M$ had something worth while and interesting. It was used in places it should not have been. Worse, the flaws from ten years ago have not been addressed or fixed. A good clean up is in order.

Re:The last thing we need

[Cctoide]

ENL4:RG3 UR FU3L R0:DS! Z1R:C0NIUM R3:INF0RC3M3NT - CH3:4P35T PR1:CES!

The way I think the conversation went

[rush22]

"Ok, techie, give me the jist of it."
"It seems the problem was with the NC9828A chip"
"Oh? And what was the problem?"
"It melted, basically. It went bonkers."
"Ah, and then what happend?"
"Err... it caused the shutdown."
"But how?"
"Well, I presume the AH-982's got deluged with data, so they shut off."
"Ah, so it was some sort of data thing."
"Kind of, the failing chip would start sending data in the network t--"
"Hey, it's like a storm of data! Hah! I get it!"
"Umm, basically."
"Oh man. A data storm! I better tell the NRC"
"Ok, sure."

Later...

"Sir, I have the cause of the shutdown, it was caused what the tech guys here would call a data storm."
"A data storm? Wow. So your reactors got a bunch of bad datas, right?"
"Errr.. kind of, the microchips melted."
"Data can do that?"
"Yeah, it's like a storm on our, uh, logic networks. I guess that can melt the microchips"
"Uh oh. Maybe this storm came from outside the plant! One of those hacker attacks!"
"Hmmmm, the guy said it melted, but I suppo--"
"Oh crap I better inform Homeland Security!"
"Ok, sure."

Later still...

"Yeah, we had a data storm and it melted the reactor networks."
"How did this data storm happen?"
"I don't think they know yet, but it messed up big time."
"My God. Do you realize this could be Al Qaeda?!!"
"Could realize wha--"
"Al Qaeda! Terrorists. Internets terrorists."
"I don't know if the reactors are hooked up to the Interne--"
"Listen. Keep this quiet, but make sure you tell everyone you know. These reactors are not safe! No one is safe from the terror!"
"Well, it was a data storm. Can terrorists make data storms?"
"Yes. They caused your meltdown."
"No, no, the microchips melted down because of the storm. A meltdow--"
"In the terror business, there's more than one type of meltdown, you just let us handle this."
"Ok, sure."

Storm in the tubes

[cyberianpan]

I've worked in IT a while now & have never heard of a "data storm". This reminds me of

And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. Ted Stevens We have plant managers concocting an odd metaphor that will only further confuse senators. Why can't they just use actual language - is it because they are deliberately trying to confuse the issue to avoid blame ? The same way the red herring of terrorism is being floated re this ? In fact it is more serious that

1) They can't describe what happened

2) They can't tell if outside interference, whatever the nature occurred

3) That this might have an internal/design cause
... than if "terrorists" did it.

Re:Storm in the tubes

[ichigo 2.0]

Because "spike in network traffic" sounds lame. Data storm, OTOH, sounds cool and dangerous. Contact Jack Bauer quickly! We need to open a new port for the nucular plant, so the terrorists don't destroy us! And while you're at it, give us more money so we can prevent these awful storms in the future!

Re:Storm in the tubes

[Anon99]

>I've worked in IT a while now & have never heard of a "data storm".

I used to work as embedded developer, and we used that term.

It was used in embedded communications when one or several devices went bonkers and flooded common bus.
Bit like packet storm, but without IP or other packet protocol, so it was called data storm.

It stands to reason that in nuclear plant there are a lot of old fogeys, so company jargon might be bit outdated and odd sounding to outsider.