Would a Smarter Grid be Less Secure?
You may have seen a flurry of news stories in the last few days about the security risks associated with the Smart Grid (see: http://earth2tech.com/2009/03/22/hacking-the-smart-grid/ and http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10201651-83.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=GreenTech and http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/20/smartgrid.vulnerability/index.html). Would the Smart Grid (or a smarter grid) be inherently insecure? If so, should it be avoided? Clearly, these are the wrong questions to ask. The pertinent questions are (or should be): would a smarter grid be more or less secure than the current grid? And if a smarter grid does, by its nature, include certain vulnerabilities, is there anything we can do to protect against them?
The current grid is a dumb network that is vulnerable to attack (even if it is not cyber attack). Because the current grid is an expansive and dumb network, our ability to protect against attack, and then react to attack, is very limited. Recall the major – and long – outages of the last several years. It would not be difficult for someone to cause serious damage to the current grid, and it would likely take us an extended period of time to resolve the causes of the disruption (and even figure out what and where they are).
A Smart Grid, on the other hand, is (or will be) susceptible to cyber attack – it is, after all, an expansive data network, likely to be based on IP. However, the difference is that a Smart Grid also inherently includes the ability to be secured – by the same means that we currently secure (sometimes not as well as we should), the Internet and other data networks (see http://earth2tech.com/2009/03/23/net-security-company-says-smart-grid-should-look-to-computing-for-security-tools/). Rather than fearing cyber attack of the Smart Grid, we should continue to invest in technological advances that will make it more secure. It is also important to keep in mind another benefit of a Smart Gird: because it is an intelligent network, we have the ability to monitor its well-being and the cause of outages and attempted attacks in real-time, which enables us to better react to attempted attacks.
For some thoughts on how to go about securing the grid, take a look at Southern California Edison’s approach:
http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/grid_security/Securing_the_Smart_Grid-528.html
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