To support the progression of solar power as the cleanest and most abundant renewable energy source available, the Department of Energy announced it would provide $128 million in funding to advance solar technologies. Among the 75 teams awarded is a group led by Dr. Le Xie, Dr. P.R. Kumar and Dr. Prasad Enjeti, who received $4.4 million for their project, “Secure Monitoring and Control of Solar PV Systems through Dynamic Watermarking.”
They will develop and demonstrate an active defense mechanism of the photovoltaic (PV) distribution system operation using a dynamic watermarking technique to monitor cybersecurity. The technique involves injecting a probe signal onto the grid to authenticate grid actions, allowing the team to determine if the grid is manipulated by hackers. The approach will include real-time deployment of online computational algorithms in critical locations.
In the smart grid, the cyber and physical layers are heavily intertwined, and while this collaboration is extremely valuable, hackers are able to compromise the PV distribution system by intruding into the cyber layer or manipulating the meter readings.
In December 2015, a grid cybersecurity attack in Ukraine left 225,000 people without power. A similar attack was carried out a year later that caused an outage of 200 megawatts. The first grid cybersecurity attack in the U.S. was in March 2019.
“We propose a defense framework against any cyberattacks on the telemetered measurements in the PV-dominated distribution system, regardless of the attack model [or] objective,” Xie said. “This is valuable in terms of providing a general-purpose guarantee since the objectives of adversaries are unpredictable.”
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Dr. P.R. Kumar
- Regents Professor
- Distinguished Professor, College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering