Pervasive Security and Control Systems

With cybersecurity so much in the news, I found myself in a heated discussion the other day about whether IT should take over SCADA, and in particular SCADA security, or whether it should not. SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) refers to the technologies that run large processes. In common use, it refers primarily to the large distribution systems, such as those for electricity, water, and gas. SCADA systems were usually designed to operate with the extreme resource constraints of last generation technology. SCADA systems have traditionally been secured primarily through isolation. Any signal that breached the outer shell was considered trusted.

It is an interesting characteristic of technology that when it is everywhere, it is no longer anywhere. Take timekeeping, one of the oldest automated technologies. Modern time technology sprang from the monastic orders of the middle ages, wherein it was important to track the time for prayer and the ordered life. As time tracking technology improved, it was moved into the clock tower or cathedral in the center of town, and used to order the economic life of the townsfolk.

Time was later brought into the homes of the wealthy, and then adopted, in the form of mantle clocks by the middle classes as a  luxury. This was followed by personal time, as pocket watches which were a sign of wealth or awarded, at retirement, as thanks for long service. Time kept growing cheaper until digital time arrived in accurate wrist watches at disposable prices. Today, time is everywhere, in ovens and in coffee-makers. Time is more important than ever, as very precise time-keeping is at the heart of telecommunications and the internet. Precise centrally managed is in every cell phone—yet time is nowhere, and watches and mantle clocks are becoming scarce.

There is a common meme in management circles that IT is becoming pervasive, and therefore beginning to fade as a separate department within companies. We have central management of network communications as a critical facility. There may even be central operating system and hardware management within a data center; that data center may instead be outsourced and no longer part of the corporate skill-set. In the service oriented world, there is central technology governance to describe how technology from each division fits together. Subject to that guidance, the divisions and department are free to manage their own development, and their own decisions.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, it was not uncommon for manufacturing corporations to have people with titles like Vice President of Electricity. The person who held this title had all sorts of strategic responsibilities. As electricity became pervasive, this role became less important. As everyone grew to understand, more or less, how to use electricity (Use the plug. Don’t drop a paperclip on the leads), the need for specialists at every step of the process became less. I have seen hotel wiring for lights installed by Edison own hand; none of us can imagine the CEO of a large research and engineering doing that contract today.

Today, electricity is everywhere and it is nowhere. Outside of those businesses that are directly involved with the production and distribution, the strategic use of electricity has vanished. Oh, you still need an electrician or two on the maintenance staff; he may also be a plumber. Electrical engineers are needed to design systems for factories or buildings. Electricity as a profession in each organization is gone. Plug in your own lamp and computer!

In a similar way, IT is becoming everywhere and nowhere. I have a computer far more powerful than any available in 1970, and with more networking bandwidth than any in 1990 sitting in pocket. It is also able to create and process video and has a display capability greater than any but the highest end computers of two decades ago. I carry it everywhere, it may be company issued, but it is never touched by company IT. Sometimes I make phone calls with it.

A decade ago, every resume claimed some experience as a webmaster. Now very few do, although they have Facebook pages and a facile familiarity with HTML. Every salesman and every factory quality team performs computerized statistical analysis as part of their work, although none of them claim to work in IT. The specialized staff who install the physical infrastructure of networking have fused with those doing analog telephony.

Much of IT is gone. Security policy staff are rising in visibility, but growing fewer in number as they use policy based tools. Software installation staff, necessary as policy locks out most users from modifying system configurations, grow closer to electricians in education and in perspective. The CIO becomes a specialized sort of efficiency expert. From this perspective, either control systems staff and the accounting staff are both IT, or are both “not IT”.

IT security offers a set of disciplines and mind-sets useful to those building their current systems with today’s tools. Knowing IT Security assists the control system engineer in the same way that knowing accounting is the path to advancement for the accounting clerk. Knowledge of auditing principles makes a better manager just as other IT-security skills make a better SCADA system architect.

I think most organizations will not have IT functions per se in the future, unless they are designing electronics, or creating new graphics systems. I think SCADA and control systems will not be run by IT, but will be perfused by the pervasive IT all around. System design, and system architecture will still matter. IT Security, with the newly popular moniker cybersecurity, will be everywhere. But IT will be gone.

What is the smart grid

There is a lot of confusion about the smart grid today. I hear all kinds of claims, along with the frequently heard “There are a lot of opinions about what the smart grid is.” Other have written that they have learned of a lot of clever little devices, but nothing that would qualify as over all smarts. The smart grid builds upon interoperability derived from the standardized telemetry and real time operations of Intelligrid. It meets the definitions of the Modern Grid Initiative. It is based upon transacted energy as described in the 2005 GridWise constitutional convention. These ideas were coded into law by the Energy Information and Security Act of 2007. There are not a lot of questions.

The problem is, the utilities are often the ones blurring things the fastest. The shining bright light of piles of federal dollars to pay for upgrades to internal problems, especially aging infrastructure, has led them to over-sell, and to over-promise. Hungry people say funny things when in sight of a free lunch.

One of the biggest barriers is a lack of architecture. The utilities have long run a seamless distribution control system, which makes a lot of sense to inexpensively manage real time events. Within that framework, direct control of devices in the end nodes makes sense as a proof of concept. But to extend beyond proof of concept, or short lived low penetration markets, a real IT architecture will need to be in place. That architecture will acknowledge interfaces, and what decision-making and capabilities should lay on either side of those interfaces.

The acknowledgement of those interfaces, and the agents that work on either side, is the moment it begins to move from “clever” to “smart” (I like that distinction). We are seeing this more in some of HAN areas, with agents built in to appliances that understand what each appliance is up to, and based on that, what sort of response is available now. In a distributed generation, or even micro-generation world, one can imagine analogous agents on the power sources.

Push this a little further by adding requirements of symmetry to each interface, and one can have device-based clever agents, responding to home (or business) based enterprise agents, negotiating with grid-based agents (whether on the micro-grid, distribution network, or at the edge of the transmission network.

To ride the clever/smart distinction a little further, intelligence in biological systems can be described as an emergent behavior of many small automata-like systems. Each of those automata faces fierce evolutionary pressures, both to do its own job better, and to interface with the whole better. If we get the interfaces right (more attention to architecture), and the security right, the smart grid can emerge from the many clever automata.

But it won’t be by applying a little Intelligrid to a substation, or by merely adding a programmable thermostat.

I am off this week to Washington where I am leading a session on the smart grid. I hope to meet some of you there.

IP Everywhere, or Just About

In February, a new administration official stated that the smart grid requires "IP everywhere", stirring considerable concern among the dumbest (in terms of grid smarts) of the smart grid players. Earlier this month, as I wrote of in The Impulse to Run Around Naked, a maker of building systems asked why we don’t just build systems with their own native languages and their own "most optimal" media. The operators of the big distribution systems (SCADA) for electricity, water, sewage, and natural gas are all a-twitter over the proposed national cyber-security directorate. This agitation in those that manage the actions of the built world is based upon misunderstandings based upon poor definitions as much as anything else.

Access to each system should be IP-based, or have the characteristics of IP. (IP refers to the Internet Protocol, usually partnered in conversation with Transmission Control Protocol as TCP/IP.) These characteristics are what is important, any protocol that meets the same characteristics can be internetworked with IP. That internetworking is the only part that matters about "IP everywhere".

IP is first of all independent of underlying protocols. Fiber, cable, wireless, and phone lines all support IP. IP can adjust to the special requirements of underlying media, as it does for Zigbee (used in self assembling networks of low bandwidth digital radios), which is only similar to IP or in 6LoPAN (an explicit mapping of IP v6 to similar radios) as long as we define IP correctly. To me, as long as the access is open, I would count Zigbee and 6LoPAN as compatible with "IP everywhere".

IP is connectionless and unreliable–by design. Older networks used to rely on dedicated wires between points-I remember limited numbers of long distance lines all across the country. Connectionless protocols do not create a connection, even a virtual one, but send the data directly. IP makes no guarantees that a message will actually get there, or that a sequence of messages will get there in order. Properly designed IP applications embrace this design; properly designed IP applications will handle network degradation with only minimal loss of function. If we make something as big as the smart grid, we had better embrace this attitude.

IP is universally addressable. Despite firewalls, routers, NAT, and other security filters, under IP if you want to send a message to any device, and you have permission to send a message to any device, you can send a message to any device. Many of the worst security breaches have occurred when a system administrator did not bother with security because the network was unreachable. Unfortunately for them (queue Jurassic Park soundtrack) IP will find a way. What can be connected to the internet, will be connected to the internet. Critical systems should be managed as if connected to the internet; any security devices or isolation techniques are then only additional security measures.

IP is a protocol that is well understood, and that can be accessed by anyone. Any systems connected to the smart grid should be IP, or should be translatable to IP without loss. All interaction should be designed to accept new connections, and errors, because that’s how IP works. All systems should be designed as if anyone can connect at any time and to manage security and self integrity on that basis. All systems in buildings and on the smart grid must be designed this way if we are going to connect them all together.

In other words, we must build the smart grid as if IP is everywhere even if it isn’t literally everywhere.

A Caffeinated view of Aging Energy Infrastructure

The local coffee shop, The OpenEye Cafe, has an outsized role in thinking about smart buildings and the smart grid. Each day when I leave the gym, I go to the OpenEye to caffeinate myself out of my post exercise torpor and to write.

The OpenEye is a great college town coffee shop, even if it is in Carrboro, the town next door to the college town. Its main room is huge for a coffee shop, fitted out with as many old couches and comfy chairs as it has little tables surrounded by mismatched chairs. It has numerous small side rooms, a patio in the back, more sidewalk seating in the front.

This size gives it a wonderful variety of subcultures, as there is the construction contractor corner, klatches of endurance runners, and every college town’s PWDIBs (people who dress in black). On weekends, the Men Who Run in Kilts fill one end, while students come in to tolerate Mom & Dad buying them some coffee. The Baristas and their friends, of course, display a cornucopia of piercings and tattoos.

So yeah, it’s a great coffee house, but how does this tie to aging infrastructure, aside from the fact that I write there?

At any time, there are 15 to 40 laptops running in the main room. When the OpenEye moved into these larger quarters, they ran surface mounted conduit and put plugs all over the walls. Window seats, with a plug under the table and a view, are at a premium. Cords snake out from the walls to the couches in mid-room tables. I wonder how significant electricity is as a cost of the shop.

There are frequent scheduling negotiations as well. Are you leaving soon? Can you plug this in for me? Excuse me you seem to have knocked out my plug. I hate those Macintosh plugs with the transformer right on the wall plug. Because they need their bottoms supported, their owners always plug into the top plug, blocking the lower plug.

But still, where is the aging infrastructure? Well, just as none ever thinks of the aging grid, no one ever thinks about wearing out receptacles. Despite being just over two years old, every receptacle in the store is one out and “loose”. Normally a receptacle hugs a plug, and provides some friction to sliding out. Not so here. With every receptacle being plugged and un-plugged countless times a day, they have actually worn out. I have to watch the battery display at the bottom of the screen, for the plugged in laptop may no longer be charging.

Still, it’s a great coffee shop, and a great community crossroads, even if it needs “plug maintenance”