Today's quality of life depends on the continuous functioning of the nation's electric power infrastructure, which depends in turn on the health of an underlying computing and communication network infrastructure that is at serious risk both from malicious cyber attacks and accidental failures. This Cyber Trust center-scale activity addresses the challenge of how to design, build, and validate a cyber infrastructure for the next generation power grid that can survive malicious cyber attacks while providing continuous power delivery. Since the constraints and vulnerabilities of the power system cyber infrastructure are similar to those faced by many other critical infrastructure systems, the solutions created are expected to be adaptable for use in those systems as well. The activity will thus have a significant impact on the way the cyber infrastructure of the future power grid and other critical infrastructures are built, making them more secure, reliable, and safe.
More specifically, this research creates infrastructure technology that will convey critical information to grid system operators despite partially successful cyber attacks and accidental failures. Security and trust validation techniques are developed that can quantify the trustworthiness of a proposed design with respect to critical properties. The activity's educational program provides an integrated undergraduate and graduate experience for students of Cyber Trust issues, including working on cross-disciplinary teams and understanding practical concerns of industry. An interactive simulator created by the project will allow users to experiment with new power grid cyber-infrastructure design approaches.
