EPES digitization and modernization is a double-edged weapon. Despite almost limitless advantages to be gained, digitization brings more opportunities for hackers to outrage the essential infrastructures. Networks are being linked, gaining complexity and allowing more devices to take part of the ecosystem, undoubtedly increasing the attack surface and weak points. How is this affecting the global energy domain? What are the possibilities to countermeasure this threat?

As advanced malicious activity on critical infrastructures are rapidly increasing in frequency and sophistication, the PHOENIX research & development project will aim to provide an impregnable cyber-shield armour for the future European energy systems.

On March 22, 2021, Dr. Artemis Voulkidis, Synelixis Solutions SA, presented the PHOENIX approach towards securing critical energy infrastructures against cyber-attacks, in the 3^rd International Forum on Smart Grids for Smart Cities in the context of the Tech Session 6, related to “Cybersecurity for critical infrastructures”.

The Phoenix project is focused on the cyber-security of Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES). One on the first steps on counter-measuring a cyber-attack is to identify the malicious activity. That task can be addressed by anomaly detection techniques. Artificial Intelligence has proven to be a suitable technology for that task.

Nature and its elements are often used as a good metaphor for attacks and risks. Thus, for example, we can talk about attack “trees” and black swan theories. But, as we can read in this blog, we rarely think about “starlings” in this context. Read more to meet the starlings looking for their metaphorical attack trees (or not so metaphorical after all).

Blockchain adoption in EPES use cases

Blockchain technology has been proposed as the backbone technology of the PHOENIX project for storing and sharing cyber threat intelligence. Among others, PHOENIX has the objective to provide at trust between the involved parties (e.g. utilities, customers, etc.), data integrity and immutability, as well as high resource availability while ensuring confidentiality and privacy of personal data.

As in the past most power outages have been determined by severe weather conditions, short-cuts or human errors some of them can be considered “engineered” attack, as were caused by malicious actors using explosions or more easily, by cutting with a chainsaw several critical power pole.

In the PHOENIX platform architecture, Secure and Persistent Communications (SPC) layer, as also reflected in its name, offers security over legacy protocols, as well as data persistency. More precisely, the SPC layer adopts a data-centric approach based on federated Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) to achieve a higher degree of persistency, traceability, availability, integrity and interoperability in the context of data communications.