FSL Sponsor Abstract: Brookhaven Science Associates LLC (BNL),

Smart Grid Data Security and Reliability

Ensuring data privacy, policy enforcement, non-repudiation, geographical disaster recovery, and resiliency to distributed denial-of-service attacks

Smart Grids collect vital data about system operation, energy production and use, information flow, user activity, and much more. This data must be secured and preserved for decades. In this project we will investigate techniques to store this data securely using, for example, strong encryption while re-encrypting periodically to keep up with technology trends. We will include policies for data access such that only authorized users can access the data they require; in addition, we will include immutable methods to record and log all accesses (e.g., provenance) such that it would be possible to determine which user(s) accessed which data and when (this is useful for forensics and mitigating the "insider problem"). All data and logs will be replicated securely across several geographically distributed locations (we propose to use CEWIT in New York and CEWIT-Korea as two sample sites). Further, we will develop techniques to resist Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks by detecting sudden spikes in unexpected activity, logging them, throttling them, and possibly blocking such connections. Our development platform will utilize the Network File System (NFS) version 4.1 protocol, a data storage protocol suitable for wide-area (e.g., cloud storage), secure, replicated data access.