Mary-Louise Hoffman
ViaSat has helped the U.S. Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory assess and implement a cybersecurity testbed for the lab’s distribution grid management system.
The company said Tuesday NREL built the DRM testbed to mimic various electric power networks and use cases related to distributed energy sources.
“Individual energy utilities can use the empirically validated cybersecurity specifications developed through this partnership to improve distribution system resiliency and better protect against internal and external cybersecurity threats of any level of severity,” said Erfan Ibrahim, director of NREL’s Cyber Physical Systems Security and Resilience Center.
ViaSat has conducted vulnerability and penetration tests on the DRM platform and identified a critical operational technology flaw that the company believes could be used to disrupt the delivery of electric power in a real-world setting.
After the discovery, NREL and ViaSat worked to bolster the security of the DRM system.
