Dartmouth researchers from the Institute for Security Technology Studies will work on a project dedicated to protecting the nation's vulnerable power grid from attack or accidental failure for the next five years, the National Science Foundation announced August 15.
The National Science Foundation has pledged $7.5 million for the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid Center project, to be led by teams from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cornell University, Washington State University and Dartmouth.
Computer science professor Sean Smith, a researcher with ISTS's Cyber Security and Trust Research Center, will head up a research team investigating possible improvements to the hardware and cyber infrastructure of the computing base supporting the power grid.
"The power grid is the infrastructure that enables all other infrastructures, like banking and finance and oil and gas," Smith said in a press release. "Researchers will focus specifically on improving the security of the computer network and developing protocol for sharing information."
The Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security will aid the NSF in funding and managing the initiative.
The project comes in the wake of the largest national blackout in U.S. history.
On Aug. 14, 2003, an estimated 50 million people in the Northeast and southern Canada were left without power, making the weakness of the system shockingly apparent.
A simple mishap the antiquated system suffered -- a fallen tree shorting out a power line in Ohio -- resulted in a series of devastating failures with no obvious means of halting the cascading effects.
"The power grid's security and reliability depends on what is essentially a vast distributed computing system that spans many organizations and environments and involves thousands of employees," Smith said.
The new Power Grid Center will strive to avoid similar disasters in the future by focusing on the building and maintenance of the power grid cyber infrastructure, making it more secure and dependable.
Following the severe effects of the 2003 blackout, the power grid has been determined to be a point of great national vulnerability and particularly susceptible to malicious attack.
The researchers assembled from the four universities will also work with a 14-member advisory board consisting of professionals from related industries that will help to introduce practical information.
Among the companies represented are Ameren, Cisco Systems, Exelon, Honeywell, Open Systems International, PJM Interconnection, PowerWorld, Siemens and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
