"ASU Researchers Collaborate Internationally to Secure Power Grid"

Yang Weng, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Arizona State University's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, is leading a cybersecurity collaboration that bridges American and Israeli organizations to improve both countries' capabilities to defend against cyberattacks on energy grid and water systems. The Israel-US Initiative on Cybersecurity Research and Development for Energy (ICRDE), came out of a proposal Weng sent to the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation. The center was approved and officially opened in 2021. The collaboration's research is divided into three main themes: modeling and understanding physical processes in energy grid computer systems while developing a related knowledge database of cyberattack types; developing advanced monitoring tools to detect cyberattacks; and designing tools to increase system resilience and ensure reliability if the energy grid faces a cyberattack. As these are broad overarching themes, the researchers devised smaller projects to help the coalition achieve its goal of defeating cybersecurity threats. The first theme, database creation and cyber-physical interaction modeling, is represented by two projects. They will develop technology capable of understanding the physical processes in an energy system and modeling them in such a way that operators can recognize when a cyberattack is happening. These projects also aim to build a knowledge database of known energy grid cyberattack types. Another project focuses on developing advanced tools for detecting cyberattacks, with the goal of developing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based detection methods that can detect new types of cyberattacks that have not yet been cataloged. One of the most important aspects of the project is ensuring that the Machine Learning (ML) models can be understood by humans performing actual cybersecurity actions. This ensures that users of ML tools can distinguish between actionable results and faulty AI-powered recommendations based on tampered data. This article continues to discuss the projects aimed at protecting energy grids from cyberattacks. 

ASU reports "ASU Researchers Collaborate Internationally to Secure Power Grid"