Privacy and confidentiality in Cyber-Physical Power Systems

Cyber-Physical Power Systems consist of significant cyber components that mange the physical electric power infrastructure under distributed control of power electronics devices. This represents a departure from more centralized SCADA-type control. NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection standards emphasize the need to protect the power infrastructure from both cyber and physical attacks and recent NIST documents also emphasize the need for privacy and confidentiality in both the AMI smart grid. The physical flow of power, the flow of sensor readings through network traffic, and the cyber computation all contain information. The combination of these information flows presents new challenges in securing cyber-physical power systems. These challenges and potential solutions are outlined in this paper.