Securing Critical Energy Infrastructures SUCCESS - Securing Critical Energy Infrastructures

Project Information

SUCCESS

Grant agreement ID: 700416

DOI

10.3030/700416

Project closed

EC signature date 26 April 2016

Start date 1 May 2016

End date 31 October 2018

Funded under

• Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

Total cost

€ 4 999 946,25

EU contribution

€ 4 999 946,25

Coordinated by

ERICSSON GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SUCCESS (Securing Critical Energy InfrastructuresSUCCESS - Securing Critical Energy Infrastructures)

Reporting period: 2017-05-01 to 2018-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Living in a safe and secure society is a fundamental human need. Large scale transformation is already happening in the energy sector due to the introduction of renewable energy which is enabling consumers to become energy producers. At the same time, devices in the home, such as Smart Meters can communicate directly with the utility giving utilities more insight into the operation of their power networks. Electrical energy production is becoming decentralised and the grid is becoming an open system with a large number of players. Transforming the power grid into such an open system requires us to address now the challenge of developing new technologies to secure the reliability of the power grid. The SUCCESS project has developed an overarching approach to threat and countermeasure analysis with a special focus on the vulnerabilities introduced by the Smart Meters, which provide new digital interfaces to critical infrastructures.

Figure 1 SUCCESS concept diagram

The project has designed, developed, and validated in small scale field trials, a novel holistic adaptable security framework applicable to critical infrastructures in general. SUCCESS has achieved this objective by encapsulating solutions to the key challenges of Security, Resilience, Survivability and Privacy into three use cases which focused on the needs of critical infrastructures in general and power utilities in particular.

Figure 2 SUCCESS – from Challenges through to preparing commercialization

The concepts drove investigations of threats and vulnerabilities of current and future Smart Meters, devices and networks, the definition and implementations of countermeasures and their use in the SUCCESS field trials, leading to demonstrations of the countermeasures in a utility context in Field Trial Open Days held at our trial sites in Romania, Italy and Ireland.

Figure 3 The SUCCESS scope

SUCCESS examined the inter-dependencies and exploited the potential interactions between the communications and critical utility infrastructures in order to use them for countermeasures, embedding security, resilience and survivability in Future Smart Grid Networks as the infrastructure underlying almost all other critical infrastructures.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"SUCCESS demonstrated its solution working in well-attended Field Trial Open Days in Romania, Italy and Ireland and in simulations with the latest prototypes of 5G infrastructure from Ericsson linked to the simulations as “Hardware in the Loop”.


Abstracts of product exploitation plans

CI-SAN
CI-SAN addresses the needs of TSOs, DSOs and other CI’s, to implement the NIS Directive, detect sophisticated cyber-attacks, automate threat intelligence sharing, incident response, and to guarantee privacy. The CI-SAN solution has been proven to successfully work for different use cases. Discussions with relevant stakeholders revealed a strong market potential for CI-SAN. Before market introduction, Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7 must be achieved.

CI-SOC (Critical Infrastructure Security Operation Centre)
The CI-SOC detect threats and applies mitigation actions to Smart Grids facing cyber threats introduced by Smart Meters. ENG plans to enrich this tool to provide a front-end interface with the ENG solution ""KNOWAGE"" before market introduction.

NORM
NORM is developed in SUCCESS project as the Next Generation Open Real Time Smart Meter based on the unbundled meter concept already developed in the Nobel Grid project. For the prototype, a low-cost embedded computer was used to enable the RPI3 platform to act as a Smart Meter Gateway (SMG).

ABC Defender as a product
Energy distribution networks are cyber-crime vulnerable because low-cost IoT devices bi-directionally communicate with peripheral Smart Meters over PLC- & wireless- networks. The ABC Defender is Artificial Intelligence enabled, cloud+edge-based sofware which performs deep analysis of data communication patterns found in Smart Grid.

5G and Ericsson Distributed Cloud Offering
Ericsson 5G products and services will be available commercially as soon as the standardisation of 5G has been completed late in 2019. The 5G Breakout Gateway functionality prototyped by Ericsson in the SUCCESS project was one of many inputs to the Ericsson 5G product range.

Low Cost PMU
The Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) market is expected to rapidly grow by 2022. For widespread deployment of PMUs in Distribution Grids the cost factor (hardware, installation costs, system integration costs, etc) is of primary importance. For this reason, the Low-Cost PMU developed in the scope of the SUCCESS project can have a positive impact on the growing market.

Physical unclonable function PUF
PUF is a full-stack cyber-physical solution, comprising a hardware security module (the PUF implementation), relative firmware as well as the cloud components affirming the security status of the devices. The first planned productization will address the agricultural domain, the smart metering industry being the second domain addressed.

Double Virtualisation
The growing digitalization in the Distribution Automation (DA) opens markets for technologies offering system resilience enhancement such as the Double Virtualisation (DV) technique. DV can be brought to the market as an additional feature of commercial products that enhances resilience and robustness of an existing DA Architecture.

ETSI standardisation
The project is very proud that it was able to organise that a new study item on cyber-security within ETSI, based on the results of the SUCCESS project and the joint efforts of the partners, was adopted by the European Communications standards organisation ETSI, in which several project partners are members. This was a major achievement for the consortium, showcasing the project learnings and results to the European and international ICT community."

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

All goals of the project were achieved, all deliverables and milestones due were delivered and KPIs for the project had a very positive outcome. The project lobbied intensively for the adoption of our concepts and proof of concept solution to ensuring the timely pan-European availability of information on attacks and for the coordination of countermeasures. A fruitful context for many of these discussions was provided by NIST as many critical infrastructure owners are now considering what type of ICT-based system they can use to comply with NIST regulations.

Figure 4 Trial site locations and technologies

The field trials demonstrated results applicable to today’s Smart Grid Networks (2016) and to Three operating trials, operated by power distribution network owners are located in Ireland Italy, and Romania. Further results are demonstrated as proof of concept prototypes, while simulations and modelling with live 5G base stations and core network infrastructures as hardware in the loop are used to demonstrate results applicable to Next Generation Smart Grid Networks (2020+) and to Future Smart Grid Networks (2030+).

The SUCCESS trial site locations

The SUCCESS Project scope

The SUCCESS Security Monitoring Solution

The SUCCESS Project concept

How SUCCESS moves from challenges to commercial results