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Securing the US Electrical Grid
An anonymous reader writes The Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress (CSPC) launched a project to bring together representatives from the Executive Branch, Congress, and the private sector to discuss how to better secure the U.S. electric grid from the threats of cyberattack, physical attack, electromagnetic pulse, and inclement weather. In this interview with Help Net Security, Dan Mahaffee, the Director of Policy at CSPC, discusses critical security challenges.
The best thing they could possibly do to protect the electric grid is to figure out how to make it not an electric grid. Because right now, J. Random Asshole can get in his pickup truck, drive 50 miles to some tower in the middle of nowhere, and cut it down with tools you can get at any construction supply store. Taking this one tower down would take out power to most of the East Coast.
Or you could simply do nothing, because the power companies are doing a great job screwing things up on their own.
If you have data that you absolutely positively must have accessible via the internet, set up a dial and point an internet connected camera at the dial.
EMP pulse is not hard - we know the basics of shielding.
Sabotage and weather are however not easily defensible. No matter what we do, we can't provide complete protection, but we can do pretty well.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They have some pretty sharp folks working on grid security at INL. While I've seen some disturbing government R&D waste in many areas, this is actually one where I have been highly impressed.
Meanwhile, the US grid has been quite reliable overall throughout the years, and the few major events that have caused large disturbances have been analyzed in detail so the preventative measures can be taken.
The book "Reinventing Fire" by Amory Lovins goes into detail in how to make the grid less vulnerable to inclement weather (including space weather). "Finally, letting distributed generators compete and interconnect fairly could nearly eliminate blackout risks by organizing the grid into local “microgrids” that normally interconnect but can stand alone at need (“islanding”). This resilient future, already demonstrated in about 20 experiments worldwide... " http://www.rmi.org/electricity
Nothing is 100%, but an air gap will force a black hat to either get someone physically on site, do some social engineering, or find someone that they can control to do their work for them.
By keeping stuff off the Internet, either air gapping or having a separate network with tightly controlled access points (or perhaps even something like a data diode [1]), it blocks all but the most well-heeled attackers, and big firms/governments are well adapted to deal with physical threats far more than stuff coming via the Internet.
[1]: I've taken two machines, each on a different network, plugged in a serial cable with one of the lines cut (so bits only moved one way), then used syslog on the secure network, and redirecting the port's output to a file on the insecure network. This wasn't fast, but it got data to people who needed it, while keeping stuff on the secure side off the Internet unless someone physically accessed it. A true data diode does the same thing, except faster... however expensive. As a hack, a dedicated line-level Ethernet tap might be something to be used because the computer plugged into the mirrored port will be unable to change or reply to the network stream coming from the secure side.
"Somebody ought hand renewable energy a cape and be done with it...." http://grist.org/news/solar-is...
The worst thing they can do is to secure it and then depend upon the security working. Thus the system should be designed so that if it is hacked every other Monday that it can survive. There have been a number of recent (last 20 years) events that have shown that single points of failure can have devastating effects. So make sure that if terrible things happen that a lesser grid can be maintained manually.
A great example of this would be a local grocery store chain's SAP system failed shortly before Christmas(some years ago). They were so dependant upon it that their ability to order stuff and manage inventory was pretty much non existent. So the store ended up looking like some kind of soviet grocery store where the only goods on the shelves were pretty much those that are managed by the distributors themselves; things like milk.
This grocery store hopefully has learned from this and now has some kind of manual backup plan where a store manager can actually phone in his orders and crudely manage the store's needs in the case of another serious computer outage.
The same with the grid. Ideally they set some sort of minimal functionality emergency plan whereby humans can crudely manage the system as opposed to a system that either works perfectly by computer or doesn't work at all.
But I worry far less about hackers and far more about system design failures and Carrington events.
If NSA has installed weaknesses and/or back doors into most commercial hardware and software globally, then everyone, Al Qaeda, as well as power companies, use the same stuff.
Ask any security manager. He'll tell you that we must assume that bad guys will eventually learn how to exploit those weaknesses and/or back doors, leaving us highly vulnerable to attack.
The Cyber Command wing of NSA has the responsibility to assure that they can successfully attack any enemy, any time. They can not know now who that future enemy might be. Therefore, the only way they can be assured of accomplishing that mission is to make sure that no computer, no IT operating anywhere on the planet is really secure. I fear that they are planting the seeds by which bad guys can attack the power grid in the future.
I reckon "inclement weather" will turn out to be the most disruptive force on electricity production and supply. Firstly, drought will starve coal, gas, and nuclear power stations of the huge amounts of water they need to run at all. Secondly, warmer water in water sources may make cooling less efficient for nuclear power stations (and possibly a danger in some cases). Thirdly there's a higher and growing risk of extreme weather events; floods, flash floods, droughts, tornados, hurricanes, and ice-storms. Just think of the more recent extreme weather events but more extreme and more frequent.