Thursday, July 30, 2009

No (Smart Grid) Security, No Peanut

Earth2Tech touches on Smart Grid security again, this time on DOE using what should prove to be an effective lever:
As Patricia Hoffman, the acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability said in a testimonial last week, the DOE may refuse to hand out smart grid stimulus funds to an otherwise promising project if that applicant can’t prove that the project has addressed cyber security concerns. Well, we should hope so — if we learned anything from the buildout of the Internet it’s that networks that have sophisticated connections will have increasingly sophisticated hackers.
But is DOE expert on cyber and other security issues? How will it know which projects to green light and which ones to deny? These questions are on the author's mind as she concludes:
We just hope the DOE is able to accurately assess the projects when it comes to security.
Same here. But since Smart Grid security standards are still being hashed out by NIST and others, it's hard to imagine what DOE will use as a baseline re: security goodness.

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