Towards Secure Demand-Response Systems on the Cloud

Demand response (DR) systems are gaining fast adoption and utilities are increasingly relying on them for peak load shaving, demand side management, and maintaining power quality. DR systems are cyber-physical systems (CPS) where the communication component is cyber, whereas the control components have physical effects. As DR systems experience wider adoption and manipulate much larger loads, achieving scalability has become an important concern. On the other hand, demand response events are often sporadic, and maintaining systems and infrastructure that could easily scale up or down is often desirable for utility companies in terms of operational cost, which makes us envision that DR systems would eventually move to the cloud. However, moving to cloud is not an elixir as it brings some concerns of its own. In this paper, we focus on Open ADR 2.0-based systems and discuss security properties and challenges that must be considered when migrating DR systems to the cloud.