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Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

All I've ever heard about the US grid is that it's held together with spit and baling wire and is highly insecure--but that's just anecdotal.

(E.g., the SCAD systems that control various aspects are eminently hackable; a few high-powered rifle rounds fired at a Palo Alto area transformer caused serious problems for days; etc, etc.)

Does anyone have any good references about overall grid reliability and security?

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To some extent this is true (and a lot of the software involved is god awful) but most of the US grid has plenty of redundancy so as to be resilient to the various storms, earthquakes, backhoes, and other damaging phenomena found in the US.

This is a good example of why redundancy doesn't protect against single-cause failure. Ugh I sound like the functional safety guy.

The core issue around powergrids is that the PLCs in use have little to no security (many cases too old to have an real security).

Further in SCADA Safety takes precedence over security. If you need to hit the SCRAM button on a nuclear reactor, you can't have a cumbersome authentication procedure.

So NIST has a set of guidlines for security which generally boil down to physical security and DMZs. Anything that needs remote connection has to have its rx pins cut (for older devices).

It's not as bad as advertised, but security is defensibly taking a back seat.

If you're really curious, give NIST.SP.800-82r2 a read.

As far as grid cyber security, check out the CIP Standards. From an electrical engineering side, there are many textbooks on reliability (see contingency analysis, state estimation, voltage stability analysis, protective relaying, and transient stability analysis)

That sounds a bit extreme. Keep in mind that the US is broadly split into the Eastern and Western Interconnect where the East is a much more dense network compared to the West. Also there is ERCOT (Texas) which only connects to the East and West through DC tie substations.

The acronym is SCADA too.

Quebec Canada is like that: it’s own system, and only interconnected through HVDC links.

Any important grid data and control signals go on a hardware VPN network run by, I think, at&t. There's no way to get on that network unless you're authorized.

This is for caiso utilities, other regions might have less or more security.

A lot of power utilities have their own fibre as they own lots of poles and transmission towers and have lots of skilled staff to design systems, string up cable and make terminations.

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