[SystemSafety] Senate passes cybersecurity bill to decrease grid digitization, move toward manual control | Utility Dive

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2019-07-03 19:20 , Gergely Buday wrote:
> I'm not quite sure whether this is the right answer to this real problem:
> 
> https://www.utilitydive.com/news/senate-passes-cybersecurity-bill-to-decrease-grid-digitization-move-toward/557959/
It may constitute a partial mitigation but of course it is not a complete answer.

The US grids (I think there are four of them, some of which include parts of Canada) rely on
real-time modelling for information on load-balancing. That real-time modelling is necessarily based
on digital computation, indeed on some specific digital machine(s) in specific places. Mismanagement
of such a machine in real-time was a cause of the 2003 NA East-Coast blackout (see "Resilience is an
Emergent System Property", Ladkin and Sieker, https://scsc.uk/scsc-131 ). That was all before
wide-spread penetration attempts. Grid management is causally dependent on such systems; they are
irreducibly digital and need adequate protection from incursion. The bill doesn't address that.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
MoreInCommon
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





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