Oct. 24, 2013
The U.S. Department of
Energy (DOE) has granted eleven awards totaling
approximately $30
million for the development of new tools
and technologies to strengthen protection of the
nation's electric grid and oil and gas
infrastructure from cyber-attack, including an
award of $3.25 million
to ViaSat Inc. . The company will work closely
with Southern California Edison and a large
utility headquartered in the South to
investigate, develop, and deploy an enhancement
to ViaSat's critical infrastructure protection
system that incorporates policy-based automated
responses to cyber events, increasing the
resiliency of transmission and distribution
networks.
ViaSat's cybersecurity
system focuses on securing utilities'
operational grids, enabling energy, water, oil
and gas, and transportation operations crews to
manage security through a virtual display of the
network. The system implements an authenticated
and encrypted "security fabric" that protects
machine to machine communications between
devices, and provides grid operators with the
ability to visualize the security state of the
system. Sensors continually update the
information in real time, creating a
hierarchical view that operators can use to
identify issues, then drill down to individual
nodes to contain or fix problems as they arise.
Augments Traditional
IT Security
Traditional IT
approaches have not adequately addressed the
real-time control systems in the operational
grid. ViaSat infrastructure protection provides
these added benefits:
- Cyber-defense in depth by applying as an
overlay to the best IT system security using
firewalls, intrusion detection, deep packet
inspection, analytics, network segmentation,
device identity management and
authentication, and other techniques.
- Policy based management to define/model
appropriate device behavior, govern response
to significant events, and other systems
management features.
- Common operational picture of
cybersecurity health for rapid network
security fault assessment, analysis, and
incident response.
- Integrates with additional systems such
as physical security, physical access
control, and user access control to make
grid operations more resilient and reliable.
All DOE cybersecurity
efforts align with the "Roadmap to Achieve
Energy Delivery Systems Cybersecurity," jointly
developed with energy sector companies. The
Roadmap outlines a strategic framework over the
next decade to design, install, operate, and
maintain a resilient energy delivery system
capable of surviving a cyber incident while
sustaining critical functions.
The ViaSat Team
ViaSat is teaming with
both Southern California Edison and another
major utility to provide an easy transition from
the lab to test and rollout into operational
networks.
"Our approach is to
use our government information assurance
expertise to develop systems that can help keep
the nation's energy flowing," said
Jerry Goodwin,
VP and general manager of Secure Network Systems
at ViaSat. "We look forward to working with our
customers on this and future developments as the
DOE implements its 10-year cybersecurity plan."
"We've been working
with ViaSat very closely to develop our
cybersecurity capabilities at SCE and this DOE
grant validates our approach," said
Jeff Gooding,
principal manager, Smart Grid System Engineering
at Southern California Edison. "The advanced
response capabilities will be a big step forward
towards enabling us to improve our response time
to incidents."
