"Keeping Hackers Off the Electrical Grid"
Attacks on grid substations increased by 70 percent in 2022 alone. Therefore, engineers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) expect new attack vectors and are taking measures against hackers using them. According to Peter Fuhr, head of ORNL's Grid Communications and Security group, the researchers try to stay ahead of cyber threats rather than just react to them after they occur. Recently, Fuhr's team demonstrated a novel method that encodes grid sensor data subliminally into a video feed using a rotating color wheel and a Fibonacci sequence decoding key that rotates the color wheel so that each sensor reading uses a unique color code. This novel implementation is a type of steganography that conceals critical information within the live video feeds from the grid substations themselves. According to Fuhr, the technique translates the encrypted character codes currently used by utilities into a color code hidden in the video feeds of cameras that already monitor substation activity. EPB effectively tested the technique for six months using a Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) link between the central-EPB grid control center and its substations. This article continues to discuss the method ORNL developed to protect our critical grid infrastructure against hackers.