From the 15th – 16th September 2014 the SPARKS consortium met in Stockholm at the campus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology for its second plenary meeting. The programme included discussions on recent activities, such as the project’s 1st stakeholder workshop, and looked ahead to next steps. A major theme of the meeting related to identifying important points of interaction between the different research activities in the project. For example, we took an initial look at how our activities on SCADA-specific intrusion detection and security analytics could form input to our research on resilient control systems. Also, connections were drawn between the work we’re doing on security analysis and analyzing security reference architectures for smart grid. As a basis for evaluating our research, we have found it beneficial to examine the NESCOR cybersecurity failure scenarios, which outline a number of attack scenarios for different smart grid sub-systems. Amongst other items, we also began to make tentative plans for our second stakeholder workshop, where we plan to demonstrate the importance of our research with illustrative cyber-attack demonstrations — watch this space for more details!
In addition to the plenary meeting, we took the opportunity to initiate early liaison activities with SPARKS’s sister project, called SEGRID (Security for smart Electricity GRIDs). On the 17th September, we held a joint workshop with some of the participants of the SEGRID consortium. At the workshop, members from each project presented their overall goals and activities. Furthermore, initial discussions focused on areas in which the project’s could benefit from collaborative effort. Early thoughts in this direction include sharing results on our respective risk assessment activities, collaborating on our efforts on standards and regulatory requirements, and identifying joint dissemination activities. The SEGRID project is coordinated by TNO, and is expected to start in the coming months.
If you want to know more about what we’re doing on the project, please get in touch via our contact page.