Potential Weaknesses in the Cyber Systems of High-Security Physical Protection Systems.
Abstract not provided.
Clem, John↗
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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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Privacy by Design in Distributed Edge Systems: Innovating Secure Workflows for Smart Cities
The proliferation of distributed edge systems, such as those in smart cities, healthcare, and industrial IoT, offers unprecedented opportunities for data processing closer to its source, thereby reducing latency and enhancing efficiency. However, these systems also present significant privacy challenges due to the handling of sensitive data from multiple sources. This article explores the critical need for designing privacy-preserving workflows in distributed edge systems to ensure data security while maximizing the potential of edge computing. By examining the challenges, technological advancements, and potential of privacy-by-design approaches, we highlight the importance of integrating advanced privacy-preserving techniques like federated learning, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proofs. These innovations are crucial for enhancing data security, regulatory compliance, and public trust in smart city applications, ultimately leading to safer and more efficient urban environments.
Kotevska, Olivera↗
Proceedings of International Symposium on Sensor Networks, Systems and Security: Advances in Computing and Networking with Applications
This state of the art book discusses current trends in sensor networks, systems, and security. This proceedings contains a collection of articles authored by outstanding researchers in the field, providing an excellent reference for graduate students and researchers in this area.
Rao, Nageswara S.↗
Secure Software Defined Radio Project: Secure Wireless Systems for the Energy Sector (Briefing 6)
Strong industry interest in the SEL-FLT/FLR products has led to a large number of customers conducting various lab and field trial evaluations of the system. These trials are on-going but have allowed SEL to collect enough information about operation and deployment and security capabilities of the system to conclude the field demo phase of the project. The field-testing topical report has been completed and submitted. SEL has also prepared a SEL-FLT/FLR best practices guide based on learnings from the field demo phase of the project. This best practice guide has also been submitted. The final deliverable from this phase of the project is an economic and operational benefits white paper, which has also been written and submitted. The overall objective of the project, extending the cyber security capabilities of utility wired networks into last mile wireless networks has been successfully achieved. SEL chose to target a sensor network for implementation of this capability because it was one area of last mile networking where there was substantial need and opportunity. Based on customer interest in the product these efforts have been a success. Interest in, and support for many of the security features of the product has been expressed by customers trialing the product system. Key security features customers value are strong data encryption, sensor white listing, and use of secure account based log on for access to the system. These and other features of the product have gained strong acceptance from customers interested in purchasing these products. All project deliverables and tasks are now complete, and the project can be closed out.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Multi-objective Optimization of Solar-driven Hollow-fiber Membrane Distillation Systems
Securing additional water sources remains a primary concern for arid regions in both the developed and developing world. Climate change is causing fluctuations in the frequency and duration of precipitation, which can be can be seen as prolonged droughts in some arid areas. Droughts decrease the reliability of surface water supplies, which forces communities to find alternate primary water sources. In many cases, ground water can supplement the use of surface supplies during periods of drought, reducing the need for above-ground storage without sacrificing reliability objectives. Unfortunately, accessible ground waters are often brackish, requiring desalination prior to use, and underdeveloped infrastructure and inconsistent electrical grid access can create obstacles to groundwater desalination in developing regions. The objectives of the proposed project are to (i) mathematically simulate the operation of hollow fiber membrane distillation systems and (ii) optimize system design for off-grid treatment of brackish water. It is anticipated that methods developed here can be used to supply potable water at many off-grid locations in semi-arid regions including parts of the Navajo Reservation. This research is a collaborative project between Sandia and the University of Arizona.
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
System for Secure Integration of Aviation Data
The Aviation Data Integration System (ADIS) of Ames Research Center has been established to promote analysis of aviation data by airlines and other interested users for purposes of enhancing the quality (especially safety) of flight operations. The ADIS is a system of computer hardware and software for collecting, integrating, and disseminating aviation data pertaining to flights and specified flight events that involve one or more airline(s). The ADIS is secure in the sense that care is taken to ensure the integrity of sources of collected data and to verify the authorizations of requesters to receive data. Most importantly, the ADIS removes a disincentive to collection and exchange of useful data by providing for automatic removal of information that could be used to identify specific flights and crewmembers. Such information, denoted sensitive information, includes flight data (here signifying data collected by sensors aboard an aircraft during flight), weather data for a specified route on a specified date, date and time, and any other information traceable to a specific flight. The removal of information that could be used to perform such tracing is called "deidentification." Airlines are often reluctant to keep flight data in identifiable form because of concerns about loss of anonymity. Hence, one of the things needed to promote retention and analysis of aviation data is an automated means of de-identification of archived flight data to enable integration of flight data with non-flight aviation data while preserving anonymity. Preferably, such an automated means would enable end users of the data to continue to use pre-existing data-analysis software to identify anomalies in flight data without identifying a specific anomalous flight. It would then also be possible to perform statistical analyses of integrated data. These needs are satisfied by the ADIS, which enables an end user to request aviation data associated with de-identified flight data. The ADIS includes client software integrated with other software running on flight-operations quality-assurance (FOQA) computers for purposes of analyzing data to study specified types of events or exceedences (departures of flight parameters from normal ranges). In addition to ADIS client software, ADIS includes server hardware and software that provide services to the ADIS clients via the Internet (see figure). The ADIS server receives and integrates flight and non-flight data pertaining to flights from multiple sources. The server accepts data updates from authorized sources only and responds to requests from authorized users only. In order to satisfy security requirements established by the airlines, (1) an ADIS client must not be accessible from the Internet by an unauthorized user and (2) non-flight data as airport terminal information system (ATIS) and weather data must be displayed without any identifying flight information. ADIS hardware and software architecture as well as encryption and data display scheme are designed to meet these requirements. When a user requests one or more selected aviation data characteristics associated with an event (e.g., a collision, near miss, equipment malfunction, or exceedence), the ADIS client augments the request with date and time information from encrypted files and submits the augmented request to the server. Once the user s authorization has been verified, the server returns the requested information in de-identified form.
Kulkarni, Deepak↗
Alliance Project: Secure Control Systems for the Energy Sector
The Alliance Project addresses Area of Interest 4: Secure Remote Access for the Energy Sector, by combining physical and cyber access under one cybersecurity access system. The Alliance Project built on the successful completion of the Lemnos and Padlock Project (DOE-Funded Project started in 2007 and 2010) and researched and developed a solution for an Ethernet Security Gateway with the functionality required to integrate the physical access control cyber system and interface with legacy and new proximity card readers used for physical access requests. This project focused on securing and enhancing the cyber system the physical access control system operates on. The team tested and demonstrated the system solution on the SEL campus. Currently the physical access cyber system is completely separate from the cyber access control cyber system. With a single system industry benefits include: (1) Single system to learn and teach employees; (2) Single system that collects and alerts on logs and events simplifying incident response plans and NERC CIP compliance; (3) Unifies trust management to a single system reducing the potential errors in privilege escalation or revocation; (4) Provides a stronger cybersecurity platform the physical access control system operates on. Today they are mostly plain text protocols and little cyber awareness; (5) Integration of physical access awareness allows the cyber system to react and adjust. In some cases, the cyber access can be enhanced with authorized physical access and other cases the cyber access can be more restricted with unauthorized physical access; and (6) Enables the utility to establish as large or as small a physical access control system as they require. One example would be when a utility shares a substation with a neighbor utility and can’t rely on the substation door for the physical access control. The Alliance technology enables them to lock equipment racks simply with no scalability issues because it stands on the cyber security infrastructure which is already highly scalable.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
A Measurement Source Authentication Methodology for Power System Cyber Security Enhancement
This letter proposes a spatial signature-based power system measurement source identification and authentication methodology. A mathematical morphology method is used to decompose the power system measurement signals and obtain the intrinsic components, which sparsity trends and roughness values are further derived to establish the time-frequency (TF) sparsity mapping. Then random forest classification is utilized to correlate the correct measurement source for each measurement signal based on the derived TF sparsity mapping. Finally, experiment results using five phasor measurement units has validated the effectiveness of this methodology.
42 ENGINEERING↗
Securing the Global Airspace System Via Identity-Based Security
Current telecommunications systems have very good security architectures that include authentication and authorization as well as accounting. These three features enable an edge system to obtain access into a radio communication network, request specific Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements and ensure proper billing for service. Furthermore, the links are secure. Widely used telecommunication technologies are Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) This paper provides a system-level view of network-centric operations for the global airspace system and the problems and issues with deploying new technologies into the system. The paper then focuses on applying the basic security architectures of commercial telecommunication systems and deployment of federated Authentication, Authorization and Accounting systems to provide a scalable, evolvable reliable and maintainable solution to enable a globally deployable identity-based secure airspace system.
Communications↗
Incorporating the Role(s) of Human Actors in Complex System Design for Safety and Security
Traditional systems engineering demonstrates the importance of customer needs in scoping and defining design requirements; yet, in practice, other human stakeholders are often absent from early lifecycle phases. Human factors are often omitted in practice when evaluating and down-selecting design options due to constraints such as time, money, access to user populations, or difficulty in proving system robustness through the inclusion of human behaviors. Advances in systems engineering increasingly include non-technical influences into the design, deployment, operations, and maintenance of interacting components to achieve common performance objectives. Furthermore, such advances highlight the need to better account for the various roles of human actors to achieve desired performance outcomes in complex systems. Many of these efforts seek to infuse lessons and concepts from human factors (enhanced decision-making through Crew Resource Management), systems safety (Rasmussen's “drift toward danger”) and organization science (Giddens' recurrent human acts leading to emergent behaviors) into systems engineering to better understand how socio-technical interactions impact emergent system performance. Safety and security are examples of complex system performance outcomes that are directly impacted by varying roles of human actors. Using security performance of high consequence facilities as a representative use case, this article will outline the System Context Lenses to understand how to include various roles of human actors into systems engineering design. Several exemplar applications of this organizing lenses will be summarized and used to highlight more generalized insights for the broader systems engineering community.
42 ENGINEERING↗
Security barriers, systems and methods
Systems, arrangements, barriers and methods for detecting illicit attempts to compromise or penetrate a physical barrier are disclosed. The systems, arrangements, barriers and methods detect illicit attempts to pry, remove or compromise a security barrier from the surface or location it protects, by insider/outsider adversaries, when any type of cabled continuity sensor (optical, electrical) is woven, embedded, or interlaced through the security barrier.
Brooks, Scott H.↗
Information flow for security in control systems
This paper considers the development of information flow analyses to support resilient design and active detection of adversaries in cyber physical systems (CPS). CPS security, though well studied, suffers from fragmentation. In this paper, we consider control systems as an abstraction of CPS. Here, we use information flow analysis, a well established set of methods developed in software security, to obtain a unified framework that captures and extends results in control system security. Specifically, we propose the Kullback Liebler (KL) divergence as a causal measure of information flow, which quantifies the effect of adversarial inputs on sensor outputs. We show that the proposed measure characterizes the resilience of control systems to specific attack strategies by relating the KL divergence to optimal detection. We then relate information flows to stealthy attack scenarios where an adversary can bypass detection. Finally, this article examines active detection mechanisms where a defender intelligently manipulates control inputs or the system itself to elicit information flows from an attacker's malicious behavior. In all previous cases, we demonstrate an ability to investigate and extend existing results through the proposed information flow analyses.
Weerakkody, Sean↗
Industrial Control Systems: Cyber Security Risk Candidate Methods Analysis
In recognition of their mission and in response to continuously evolving cyber threats against nuclear facilities, Department of Energy - Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) is building the Nuclear Energy Cyber security Research, Development, and Demonstration (RD&D) Program, which includes a cyber risk management thrust. This report supports the cyber risk management thrust objective which is to deliver "Standardized methodologies for credible risk-based identification, evaluation and prioritization of digital components." In a previous task, the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) team presented evaluation criteria and a survey to review methods to determine the most suitable techniques. In this task we will identify and evaluate a series of candidate methodologies. In this report, 10 distinct methodologies are evaluated. The overall goal of this effort was to identify the current range of risk analysis techniques that were currently available, and how they could be applied, with an focus on industrial control systems (ICS). Overall, most of the techniques identified did fall into accepted risk analysis practices, though they generally addressed only one step of the multi-step risk management process. A few addressed multiple steps, but generally their treatment was superficial. This study revealed that the current state of security risk analysis in digital control systems was not comprehensive and did not support a science-based evaluation. The papers surveyed did use mathematical formulation to describe the addressed problems, and tied the models to some kind of experimental or experiential evidence as support. Most of the papers, however, did not use a rigorous approach to experimentally support the proposed models, nor did they have enough evidence supporting the efficacy of the models to statistically analyze model impact. Both of these issues stem from the difficulty and expense associated with collecting experimental data in this domain.
45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
Defensive Cybersecurity Architecture Design Using Force-on-Force Cyber-Physical Modeling
Currently, nuclear power plant physical security systems are highly dependent on air-gaps as a protective measure against cyber-threats. Cyber-physical threats become more likely as advanced cyber-threat capabilities to jump air-gaps transition into common use. Defending against the emerging threat of cyber-enabled physical intrusions is poorly understood. The consequence of these cyber-physical attacks has no quantitative analysis method to inform risk-informed, performance-based cybersecurity approaches. By modifying the physical security simulation tool Dante, cyber-physical threat consequence was able to be analyzed on a notional facility. The results of this analysis are used to design a Defensive Cybersecurity Architecture (DCSA) for the physical security system to produce example resilience measures for this notional facility. A DCSA defines security levels to provide a graded approach for defending plant functions, and security zones for trusted communication between systems. This approach can be applied to real world systems to produce physical protection systems and response measures that are resilient to cyber-physical threats.
45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
Deliberate Motion Analytics Fused Radar and Video Test Results Deployed Beyond the Perimeter Fence in a High Noise Environment
Security systems that protect the nation’s critical facilities must be capable of detecting physical intrusions in all weather conditions. Intrusion detection sensors in a perimeter with a high nuisance alarm rate (NAR) significantly undermine detection performance and degrade security system effectiveness. This research demonstrated a fused sensor system that can differentiate foliage and weather-induced nuisance alarms from those caused by intruders, providing reliable detection within a two-fence perimeter or beyond the fence. A key element of this work is the creation and application of a “deliberate motion algorithm” that fuses alarm data from radar and video analytics to create video motion detection fused radar system. The two-layer architecture of the algorithm uses machine learning, multi-hypothesis tracking, and Dynamic Bayes Nets to differentiate intruder alarms from weather induced alarms.
47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
Information Security and Integrity Systems
Viewgraphs from the Information Security and Integrity Systems seminar held at the University of Houston-Clear Lake on May 15-16, 1990 are presented. A tutorial on computer security is presented. The goals of this tutorial are the following: to review security requirements imposed by government and by common sense; to examine risk analysis methods to help keep sight of forest while in trees; to discuss the current hot topic of viruses (which will stay hot); to examine network security, now and in the next year to 30 years; to give a brief overview of encryption; to review protection methods in operating systems; to review database security problems; to review the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (Orange Book); to comment on formal verification methods; to consider new approaches (like intrusion detection and biometrics); to review the old, low tech, and still good solutions; and to give pointers to the literature and to where to get help. Other topics covered include security in software applications and development; risk management; trust: formal methods and associated techniques; secure distributed operating system and verification; trusted Ada; a conceptual model for supporting a B3+ dynamic multilevel security and integrity in the Ada runtime environment; and information intelligence sciences.
Source record↗
Solar heating system at Security State Bank, Starkville, Mississippi
The 312 square feet of Solaron flat plate air collectors provide for 788 square feet of space heating, an estimated 55 percent of the heating load. Solar heated air is distributed to the 96 cubic foot steel cylinder, which contains two inch diameter rocks. An air handler unit moves the air over the collector and into the steel cylinder. Four motorized dampers and two gravity dampers are also part of the system. A Solaron controller which has sensors located at the collectors, rock storage, and at the return air, automatically controls the system. Auxiliary heating energy is provided by electric resistance duct heaters.
Source record↗
Assessing the potential of composite confining systems for secure and long-term CO 2 retention in geosequestration
A potential geologic target for CO 2 storage should ensure secure containment of injected CO 2 . Traditionally, this objective has been achieved by targeting reservoirs with overlying seals-regionally extensive, low permeability units that have been proven capable of retaining buoyant fluid accumulations over geologic time. However, considering that the amount of CO 2 is limited by a decadal injection period, vertical migration of CO 2 can be effectively halted by a composite system of discontinuous shale/silt/mudstone barriers in bedded sedimentary rocks. Here, we studied the impact of depositional architectures in a composite confining system on CO 2 migration and confinement at reservoir scale. We stochastically generated lithologically heterogeneous reservoir models containing discontinuous barriers consistent with statistical distributions of net-sand-to-gross-shale ratio (NTG) and horizontal correlation lengths derived from well log data and observations of producing hydrocarbon fields in Southern Louisiana. We then performed an extensive suite of reservoir simulations of CO 2 injection and post-injection to evaluate the sensitivity of CO 2 plume migration and pressure response of the composite system to a series of geologic and fluid parameters including the lateral continuity of barriers, NTG, permeability anisotropy within the sand body, and capillary pressure contrast between the sand and shale facies. The results indicate that lateral continuity of barriers and NTG are the dominant controls on CO 2 plume geometry and pressure build-up in the reservoir, while the impact of NTG is particularly pronounced. The significance of intraformational barriers becomes apparent as they facilitate the local capillary trapping of CO 2 . Those barriers improve the pore space occupancy by promoting a more dispersed shape of the plume and ultimately retard the buoyancy-driven upward migration of the plume post injection.
58 GEOSCIENCES↗