Reliable electricity is crucial for our economy and daily life. However, the bulk power grid faces growing risks from cyber attacks and physical sabotage that could damage critical equipment. To tackle these threats, NERC has announced a new Security Integration Strategy. The goal is to strengthen defenses by linking cyber security and physical security more across the whole power grid.
Currently, cyber security and physical security are often managed separately. Currently, cyber security and physical security are often managed separately. It calls for power companies to share data and analytics between their cyber and physical security teams. This can improve threat detection, protective measures, and resilience.
Full integration enables new capabilities. For example, cyber threat data can inform enhanced physical access controls at vulnerable sites. And surveillance analytics can detect suspicious activity suggesting cyber intrusions.
By bridging cyber and physical security, the bulk power system can leverage more robust, unified protections. Removing divides between operational groups also cultivates a more holistic security culture. This strategy paves the way for the grid to meet 21st-century threats.
Why are NERC CIP Standards So Crucial?
NERC has developed a set of CIP cybersecurity standards for the electricity sector. They provide a framework to manage risks that threaten grid reliability. As connections between IT systems and OT equipment on the power grid grow closer, these CIP reliability standards form the first line of defense against cyber threats.
Several factors underscore the importance of ongoing compliance with NERC CIP:
- Specialized OT environments: Grid infrastructure utilizes specialized hardware, software, and protocols that mainstream IT security tools cannot safeguard. NERC CIP standards account for sector-specific legacy constraints and requirements.
- System intricacy: With control systems, field devices, transmission networks, and generation representing complex, interlinked environments, Only rigorous, layered protections guarantee resilient operations.
- Regulatory mandates: NERC CIP adherence allows entities to show due diligence, meet compliance burdens, and avoid steep violation penalties levied by bodies like FERC and DOE.
- Evolving threatscape: As seen in intrusions like SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline, attackers probe new vectors. Mandatory reporting and regular audits ensure standards dynamically adapt to emerging risks before incidents manifest.
By instilling these fundamental principles early via rigorous cross-functional coordination, NERC’s strategy paves the way for the secure smart grid of the future while meeting essential NERC CIP compliance requirements.
The Core of NERC’s Security Integration Strategy
NERC’s Security Integration Strategy serves as a blueprint for embedding security across all facets of grid management. It emphasizes integrating cyber and physical security considerations starting from the design phase, rather than bolting on defenses as an afterthought. The strategy focuses on these key areas:
Cyber-Informed Transmission Planning
- Incorporates cybersecurity threat modeling into transmission planning methodologies
- Analyzes vulnerabilities to balance optimal grid expansions with minimized attack surfaces
- Models security breach scenarios and high-risk contingencies to harden defenses via segmentation, resiliency zones, and control optimizations
Security Integrated Design And Operations
- Mandates engineers consider security fundamentals during system design and operations
- Addresses gaps in legacy architectures by upgrading sites to current standards
- Requires following strict access controls, testing processes, and recovery measures aligned to reliability guidelines
Grid Transformation
- Defines a framework for securing emerging grid modernization programs and technologies
- Provides best practices, risk assessments, and reference architectures tailored to initiatives like smart meter rollouts
- Evolves standards to address issues arising from the integration of new systems like DERMS and ADMS
Emerging Technologies
- Identifies guidelines and procedures focused on securing exponential growth areas. Areas such as DERs, smart inverters, cloud platforms, and IoT networks
- Highlights priority action items such as developing dedicated reliability standards for DER aggregators to mitigate identified risks
- Focuses on prevention and early mitigation by addressing vulnerabilities beginning from the design phase
This multi-pronged approach ensures security gets embedded into the foundation of grid management, creating a resilient architecture for the modernized electricity ecosystem.
Prioritizing Risks, Informed by Insights
Executing NERC’s ambitious cyber-physical security strategy requires a rigorous method for identifying, validating, and prioritizing risks to drive mitigation. This entails adherence to a systematic six-step process:
1. Risk Identification/Validation
- Aggregate risk inventory compiled from varied public and private sources
- Inputs span known threats, zero-day vulnerabilities, geopolitical analyses, and field observations
- Risk validation performed through evidentiary analysis, impact modeling, and corroboration across sources
2. Risk Prioritization
- Profile methodology analyzes probability, criticality, and exploitability to determine priority level
- Considers systemic risks, dependencies, and potential for cascading failures across interconnections
- Prioritization schema evolves based on the shifting threat landscape
3. Remediation/Mitigation Id
- Detailed identification of policies, procedures, controls, and programs needed to mitigate risks
- Involves defining roles and responsibilities, implementation roadmaps, and measuring desired risk reduction outcomes
- Considers costs, feasibility, and constraints around existing environments and resources
4. Deploy Mitigation
- Risk mitigation deployment as per priority level, cost-benefit justification, and feasibility
- Follows change management processes spanning impact analysis, configuration, and testing
- Execution tracked via progress metrics and post-implementation validation
5. Measure Success
- Leverages quantitative key performance/risk indicators to measure effectiveness
- Methods include red teaming, cyber threat simulations, and modeling to confirm risk reduction
- Validation through field observations, audits, and routine testing procedures
6. Monitor Residual Risk
- 24/7 monitoring for emergent threats and existing vulnerabilities needing remediation
- Continuous improvement processes to address capability and performance gaps
- Regular collaboration across public and private stakeholders to contextualize the latest risk insights
By integrating inputs from partners like the E-ISAC and following this rigorous process, NERC ensures a dynamic yet structured approach to securing the grid against a fluid range of threats.
Key Strategic Areas
Having outlined the framework guiding NERC’s strategy, let’s highlight four areas vital for integrating security today and tomorrow:
Cyber-informed Transmission Planning
Ensuring resilient transmission lies at the heart of delivering reliable electricity. By integrating cybersecurity threat modeling into system planning, NERC aims to balance optimal grid expansion with a minimized attack surface. Threat scenarios help model high-risk contingencies to harden defenses via segmentation, resiliency zones, and control optimizations.
Securing Distributed Energy Resources
With grid modernization driving widespread DER adoption, NERC focuses on securing smart inverters and DER aggregators leveraged to balance renewable intermittency. From issues like denial-of-service attacks to compromised DERMS controls, targeting vulnerabilities early is key. Developing dedicated reliability standards for DER aggregators represents an urgent next step.
Embracing Cloud Technology Responsibly
Migrating operational technology (OT) and grid management platforms to the cloud promises benefits like scalability and resiliency. However, as NERC’s cloud adoption guidance emphasizes, the shared responsibility model requires stringent controls tailored to the sector’s specialized environments, along with extensive testing and training to counter risks related to third-party access and outages.
Focusing on Physical Security
With remote attacks leveraging cyber vulnerabilities to manifest, integrating physical resilience against threats like drones, EMPs, and sabotage attempts grows imperative. NERC’s push for utilities to adopt technologies like perimeter surveillance, blast/projectile protections and airspace monitoring reflects this demand.
Driving Progress through Collaboration
For NERC’s strategy to work, power companies and government groups must collaborate closely. Groups like the Joint Electric Sector Cybersecurity Working Group (JESCWG) coordinate public and private stakeholders. This helps convert cyber risk data into actionable recommendations that the NERC makes into enforceable standards.
The Reliability and Security Technical Committee also assists NERC by steering vital technical research and standards development to achieve security milestones.
Partnerships with independent organizations like the NATF allow NERC to tap outside expertise while fashioning guidance aligned with grid reliability goals.
The Road Ahead
NERC has big reliability goals for 2023 across key areas to enhance grid resilience, security, and connectivity. The objectives push state-of-the-art tools and techniques toward deeper integration for carrier-grade robustness. Some priorities include reinforcing cyber defenses as threats get more advanced, optimizing early anomaly detection through AI, and harnessing real-time data sharing to accelerate incident response.
Additional projects coordinate protection upgrades to weather-exposed equipment, guide the safe deployment of new smart grid technologies, and promote culture shifts towards more holistic cross-functional security.
The connective thread throughout these ambitious megaprojects is the deeper integration of cyber, physical, and operational practices to safeguard interdependent electricity systems. As grids modernize through digitalization and distributed resources, unified protection extending across IT, OT, the cloud, and more becomes mandatory.
By dissolving stale divisions between technology, infrastructure, and personnel domains, NERC seeks to spark an evolution that immunizes the grid against emerging risk scenarios. The vision manifests reliability not directed inward, but outward across collaborators who uphold an irreplaceable grid.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some key challenges in blending cyber and physical security into grid operations?
Integrating cyber and physical security is complicated by the increasing connectivity of operational technology systems and their convergence with information technology networks. Constraints around supporting legacy devices and the need for open architectures to enable grid modernization can conflict with strict access controls. Resource and talent gaps also affect deployment.
How does NERC’s strategy account for Black Swan events beyond typical emergency response?
By implementing security fundamentals across interdependent planning, design, and operational domains, NERC aims to architect resilience even against unknown threats. Running extreme-event drills, war gaming high-impact scenarios, analyzing past failures, and building redundancy and flexibility into processes allow better preparation for novel attacks.
What role can distributed energy vendors play in supporting NERC’s grid security efforts?
As distributed and renewable energy expands technology partners responsible for enabling assets like rooftop solar, EV charging, and battery storage must focus on designing security and access controls into their products aligned with NERC’s reliability standards. They can also collaborate with utilities on threat modeling related to DER integration and grid modernization efforts.