we are very dependent upon electricity
and recent events such as superstorm
sandy and the blackout at the 2013 Super
Bowl have been a very real reminder that
our electricity grid today is pretty
fragile and most of the time when we
have a power outage the impact is a lot
more serious than a hundred and eight
million sports fans waiting for the game
to resume this picture behind me of the
New York skyline is a really good
reminder of the horrid impact that
hurricane sandy had and the way that it
changed our normal everyday lives
you know partly and largely because we
lost power so now we're taking this very
very critical resource and we're
exposing it to a new threat it's kind of
ironic that as we inject more technology
to make the grid stronger and smarter
and more resilient we also open it to a
new threat which is cyberattack now
please don't get me wrong I'm a big
believer in smart grid I think it has
amazing capabilities to allow us to
integrate more renewable energy we can
implement new efficiency programs for
our resources we can empower consumers
in new ways all really really good
things but as we add communications and
intelligence we also potentially expose
a vulnerability to it as well in fact
the Department of Homeland Security
reports that 40% that's four zero
percent of the cyber attacks they
responded to in 2012 were against the
energy sector now that also includes oil
and gas but I think it's very safe to
assume that our electricity grid is a
target so I'm very very fortunate to be
leading a project that's working in this
area and helping to address this very
real concern I've joined a team that's
been working in this space for a couple
of years and in fact has been in
dialogue with hundreds of experts across
the energy sector the security sector
and has come up with
this formulation of what we call a
security fabric architecture the grid is
by definition connected so securing it
is very complex it's not enough to put
malware protection on a control system
device though that's not a bad thing to
do
it's not enough to establish secure
communications using VPN between two
critical infrastructure endpoints
although that's still also a really good
thing to do what we really want to do
with the grid is to establish end-to-end
security with the appropriate level of
protection for the devices and the
applications commensurate with the
criticality that they bring to the
application or to the the infrastructure
and so we really need that right level
of security and it needs to be designed
in just as a woven fabric is much
stronger than the individual threads
that make it up we can make the grid
more secure by adding more security
capabilities to the various elements
that make it up and that includes things
like adding hardware level protection
supporting that in the operating systems
and also in the applications that are
running on power platforms by adding all
of those layers we can make them
stronger and then by establishing very
secure confidential communication
between endpoints again relying on the
trust that can be built into the
hardware and those layers of protection
we can deliver a much stronger grid they
all work together and those combine
layers can help us detect anomalous
behavior even if that behavior hasn't
been seen before or the signatures as
it's sometimes called hasn't been seen
before and our requirement is to do all
of that very very quickly some of these
power technologies operate on very high
speed networks as an example they may be
taking measurements 60 times a second
and we need to secure that so this is
moving now into the field we're
implementing our first instantiate
of this security fabric notion in Texas
so it turns out in the United States we
have three high-voltage transmission
grids we have East we have the West and
Texas has its own a lot of people say
Texas is like its own country and it's
actually very exciting in Texas the
government is funding a project to
implement something called synchro
phasers and these synchro phasers are
used or will be used to help manage the
integration of large-scale wind into the
grid and so in addition to being a very
cool sounding word I love the word
synchro phaser they take very high
frequency measurements of the voltage
characteristics of the transmission
lines and so it's important given that
those measurements will be used to
manage the grid that they be accurate
and so we need to secure the devices we
need to secure the communications the
visualization and eventually the
automated response so we're beginning
the project now to weave together all of
these technologies and to deliver this
new notion of a security fabric and a
stronger grid so wish us luck and thank
you very much
you