Keeping Hackers Off the Electrical Grid

Biggest issue.

Keeping Hackers Off the Electrical Grid

By R. Colin Johnson

Commissioned by CACM Staff, June 20, 2023

ORNL researchers showed how to encode grid operating data into a unique color pattern hidden inside a single video frame, which can be transmitted to a grid control center computer using a Fibonacci sequence to encode/decode each sensor reading.

Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

As attacks on grid substations increase—by 70% in 2022 alone, according to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—engineers there are anticipating new attack vectors and taking measures to protect from hackers using them.

"As researchers, we try to stay ahead of cyber threats, not just react to them after they occur," said ORNL's Peter Fuhr, who heads its Grid Communications and Security group. Fuhr's group recently demonstrated a new method of using a rotating color wheel to encode grid sensor data subliminally into a video feed, and using a novel Fibonacci sequence decoding key that rotates the color-wheel so each sensor reading uses a unique color code.

"ORNL has invented a compelling method to protect our critical grid infrastructure that builds upon known encryption technology," said Sterling Rooke, chief executive officer (CEO) of Brixon Inc. (Baltimore) , a company that manufactures electrical power monitoring instruments. "With the right application, there will be a need for this novel implementation—a kind of steganography that conceals critical information within the existing live video feeds from the grid substations themselves."

The technique, Fuhr says, translates the encrypted character codes utilities use today to a color-code hidden in video feeds from cameras that already monitor substation activity. EPB (formerly the Electric Power Board, Chattanooga, TN) successfully tested the technique for six months using a virtual local area network (VLAN) link between the central-EPB grid control center and its substations. "We proved the concept in the lab at ORNL, then extended the testing to a nearby substation, and eventually installed the color encoding/decoding equipment at both the EPB substation and its central-control computer," said Fuhr. "It's the real deal—tested and proven."

According to Fuhr, EPB and most industrial process control architectures in the U.S. follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP800-82 guidelines for all industrial process control (IPC) systems—including factories, manufacturing, and automated testing, as well as the grid. His color encoding/decoding technique will work not only for grid communications from a grid central control computer to its substations, but for any operational technology (OT). In fact, several private companies have already shown interest in licensing his color-coding architecture, according to Fuhr.

Historically, Internet connections have offered an entry point for sophisticated hackers to insert malware into substations, which are almost universally run by SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) networks, which date back to the 1950s, when cybersecurity wasn't even a word. Even today, SCADA networks typically do not require any authentication to remotely execute commands on a control device. To solve most vulnerabilities, the NIST guidelines forbid the central control computer—which is typically connected to corporate IT—to extend Internet availability to the SCADA control system. NIST-compliant SCADA architectures are isolated from the Internet by firewalls that instead run a multi-channel virtual local area network (VLAN) to substations connected to its central control computers. Likewise, communicating data from sensors and to actuators run on different channels of the VLAN. Most operations are programmable, but run autonomously at unmanned substations; human operators can also use a graphical user interface (GUI) for high-level configuration and supervision of remote machines and processes.

Over the years as cybersecurity has become an increasingly important issue, many hacker-resilient modifications have been added to SCADA architectures. These security measures, however, have not been universally applied. The result has been numerous attacks dating back to 2000, when a disgruntled former employee took control of the Maroochy Shire sewage OT system in Queensland, Australia, using a single computer and a radio transmitter. Since the commercialization of the Internet, many hackers have attacked process control systems, including utilities, forcing new (and retrofit) SCADA industrial protocols to segment their networks with gateways, routers, one-way-only data-diodes, and white-listing that only passes traffic of a single type down each VLAN channel. In addition, VLAN channels are only bi-directional when they need to be, are segmented so they can only communicate with devices with which they were meant to communicate, and are not allowed to connect to the central corporate network without at least a firewall (for maximum security, with two firewalls on each side of a DMZ (demilitarized zone) server that securely forwards communications).  ... ' 

Exascale Supercomputer Can Do a Quintillion Calculations a Second

 Supercomputer advances as well

Exascale Supercomputer Can Do a Quintillion Calculations a Second

Scientific American, Sarah Scoles, , ORNL, February 9, 2023

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer, the world's first declared exascale computer, can perform one quintillion calculations per second and is 2.5 times faster than the world's second-fastest computer. Frontier, which came online last year, will soon be joined by exascale supercomputers El Capitan at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory. While the primary goal of these devices is to run calculations to help maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile overseen by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, they also will be used to solve intractable problems in pure science.Semantic Web For The Working Ontologist, Third Edition: Effective Modeling In RDFs And Owl  .... 

Top Supercomputers

High performance computing.  (HPC) 

Frontier Keeps Top Supercomputer Spot

By HPCwire, November 16, 2022

The Frontier supercomputer.

Top500 coauthor Jack Dongarra acknowledged that not all the systems on the Top500 are being used for scientific computing, adding that one way to get a better sense of the real HPC machines is to look at the top 100 or 200 systems on the list.

The Frontier system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory remained the world's top supercomputer on the 60th Top500 list, clocking 1.102 exaflops and scoring highest on the HPL-MxP benchmark with 7.9 exaflops.

The third-highest-ranking supercomputer, Finland’s Lumi, had the second-highest HPL-MxP score with 2.2 exaflops, while Japan's second-ranked Fugaku supercomputer earned the third-highest HPL-MxP position with 2.0 exaflops.

Fugaku held its lead position on the High Performance Conjugate Gradients benchmark with 16 Linpack petaflops, while Frontier scored second with 14 petaflops.

Lumi grew its computational footprint, raising its score from 151.9 to 309.1 petaflops.

From HPCwire   View Full Article       

Deep Learning Makes X-Ray CT Inspection of 3D-Printed Parts Faster, More Accurate

 Inspection applications for Deep Learning, 

Deep Learning Makes X-Ray CT Inspection of 3D-Printed Parts Faster, More Accurate

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

S. Heather Duncan, October 14, 2022

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a deep-learning framework that uses X-ray computed tomography (CT) to improve the speed and accuracy of inspecting three-dimensionally (3D) printed metal parts. The framework is being incorporated into software commercial partner ZEISS uses in its equipment at DOE’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL, where companies get help perfecting their 3D printing. ZEISS's Pradeep Bhattad said, "With this, we can inspect every single part coming out of 3D-printing machines. Currently CT is limited to prototyping. But this one tool can propel additive manufacturing (3D printing) toward industrialization."

Health Record Relationships using KESER

Health record relationships.  KESER Knowledge Extraction.

 VA, ORNL, Harvard Develop Novel Method to Identify Complex Medical Relationships

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, April 28, 2022

A team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has developed a novel technique to identify complex medical relationships from electronic health records. The KESER (Knowledge Extraction via Sparse Embedding Regression) method combines data from the VA and Boston-based non-profit hospital and physicians network Partners Healthcare, and facilitates automated feature selection to support phenotype identification algorithms and knowledge discovery. KESER converts data into a structured format, builds a low-dimensional-vector model of each medical code, selects features to attribute importance, and charts attributed relationships into a network. The researchers processed vast medical datasets, built a co-occurrence matrix of 100,000-plus healthcare codes, and automated data pre-processing .... '

Simulating Building Energy use in Context with Digital Twins

A good example of the use of 'digital twins'.    Challenge will be to get the required detail for so many buildings with different ages, designs, updates, designs. Shows both the possibilities and the complexity involved.

ORNL's Simulation Tool Creates Digital Twins of Buildings From Coast to Coast

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, August 11, 2021 

Modeling software designed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) can simulate the energy profiles of all 129 million buildings in the U.S. The researchers developed the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM) software suite to realize ORNL's five-year Model America vision of producing digital twins for all U.S. buildings. AutoBEM uses high-performance computing to collect publicly available data like satellite imagery and street views, then generates a building energy model to forecast which energy-saving technologies could be implemented. ORNL's Joshua New said, "Before this program, no one had the capability to perform that analysis with detailed, building-specific energy modeling at this scale. Individual utilities now have the capability to perform modeling to show the potential of reducing demand and greenhouse gas emissions."

Crowdsource the Problem, Distribute Solutions.

Lots of Possibilities Here, find ways to find them

Folding@Home Network More Powerful Than World's Top 7 Supercomputers Combined
Tom's Hardware
by Paul Alcorn

The Folding@Home distributed computing network is currently churning out 470 petaflops of raw computing power, which is more powerful than the collective computing muscle of world's top seven supercomputers, in a push to defeat the coronavirus pandemic. That compares to the 149 petaflops of sustained output generated by the world's fastest supercomputer, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)'s Summit system. ORNL announced two weeks ago that Summit had been enlisted in the fight against COVID-19. Folding@Home said the number of contributors in its fight against the pandemic has risen 1,200%.  ... "

Smart Cities Based on Good Models

Here energy is the starting point, but other aspects of city resource use, transportation processes, risk analyses and other goal and future predictive models should also be included with a base foundational descriptive model to work from.   

Modeling Every Building in America Starts with Chattanooga
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
Rachel Harken

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed a building energy model that automatically extracts high-level building data from publicly available information. The team demonstrated its new approach by using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF's) Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer to model the energy usage of every building serviced by the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, TN. The supercomputer found the electric utility could save between $11 million and $35 million a year by adjusting electricity usage during critical peak times. Said ORNL’s Joshua New, "We're not just creating these models and doing what-if analyses in the blind. We have an error rate for every building on how closely we're matching that 15-minute energy use."  ... "