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.

The 22nd Days of Energy Conference took place on 23rd and 24th November 2020 as an online conference and was organized by Slovenian media company Finance (https://dnevi-energetikov.si/). Days of Energy is a central event for energy managers and experts from Slovenian companies, research institutions and all those who operate on the principle of efficient energy use.

In October 2020, BTC Company, as a sponsor, financially and substantively supported the implementation of the Conference 24/7/365 (https://www.gzs.si/Dogodki/2-10-2020/konferenca-247365) and the CyberNight event (https://cybernight.org),  organized by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia and Digital Innovation Hub of Slovenia.

The H2020 project DEFENDER (Grant n° 740898) has reached its final review September 18th. Being part of the H2020-CIP-2016-2017, the project focuses on the use of innovative technologies to handle cyber-physical attacks on critical energy infrastructures. It involves 18 partners, including several partners from the PHOENIX consortium (RWTH, SingularLogic, ASM Terni, BFP, Elektro-Ljubljana and Thales). DEFENDER has developed tools that will be used as inspirations in the project PHOENIX, including the cosimulator, the CEI Incidents Information Sharing Platform, the Incident Detection Framework and the Incident Mitigation Framework.