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.