Scientists Take an All-Hazards Approach to Smart Grid Security

You can feed power back to the Grid, the Grid can tell you how much power you're using throughout the day, and -- if you want -- it can control your appliances for you.

And that's just way too tempting for hackers, thieves and other criminals.

Lee is the Senior Cybersecurity Strategist in the Computer Security Division Information Technology Laboratory at NIST.

It is her mission to make sure the Smart Grid is secure.

She runs a task group of upwards of 200 people -- all volunteers -- from the public sector, academia, and private industry. She says there's a lot to do, but they're more ahead of the curve than you might think.

"There is a lot out there now. We are not starting from 'no security.' Because there are a significant amount of security controls there now. But we need to make sure that when all of the grid is interconnected that the entire grid is secure. Right now you have a lot of older equipment; 40 and 50 years old. It has minimal security."

When you think of IT security, you probably think of identity theft, denial of service attacks, worms or viruses.

Lee has to think of much more than that.

She calls is an "all-hazards" approach to security of the Smart Grid.

"Foreign countries, hackers, crime bosses, the criminal element and weather. I was at DHS when Hurricane Katrina hit. DHS' mission at the time focused on threats from other countries and nation states. [After Katrina] we really expanded our mission because we realized how much weather can impact our entire country. So we have to look at that, because if you interconnect all of the grid and you have a major event like a hurricane, an earthquake, a tornado an ice storm in some areas that were out a month or six weeks, it can affect the overall grid, not just one region."

On top of all that, there are privacy issues. A thief could attempt to hack into the system and access your information online. But unscrupulous neighbors could also try to break in to get you to foot their electric bill.

But sometimes things go wrong by accident.

There's no act of nature, no criminal intent; it is just a glitch. Lee's job is to make sure that doesn't happen - or, if it does happen - to keep a small problem from becoming a large one.

"You want to make sure that the command that's sent is the one that's received. There can be failures in equipment. IT breaks down. That doesn't necessarily mean that a hacker went in and changed it or a nation state did something but there could be a failure in equipment. So a big part of this is looking at the integrity of the commands and making sure that the commands sent to the device is what you want it to do."

Lee is in charge of all of the security for the entire grid. Her staff is all volunteer. Which means she is under a tremendous amount of pressure in this 24/7/365 job.

"You look at the impact and potentially what could happen, it is nerve wracking at times. Oh, it keeps me up at night. Seven days a week. The nice thing is that we're not starting from nothing. There's are a lot of controls out there. It is coordinating it and getting our hands around what's out there and then coming up with the controls that make the best sense."

Even still, there's more to security than just the software for the Smart Grid.

Now there is some concern about what might happen if the Global Positioning System is tampered with.

GPS plays a large role in making the Smart Grid work.