Contact: Maaz Mashood Mohiuddin
Background:
To allow for the increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources we have developed Commelec [1], a protocol for real-time control of electrical grids. Commelec consists of a grid agent and resource agents that exchange messages to control the grid every 100 ms.
We have a full-scale deployment of a microgrid that uses Commelec to control the electrical grid of the ELL building at EPFL. This microgrid comprises resource agents that are spread over a wide area network (WAN) across the EPFL campus. As this deployment is used to control a real electrical grid, any security vulnerability in the deployment exposes the underlying grid to an adversary. The goal of this project is to design and implement the security infrastructure for the microgrid.
Project Goals:
- Setup a demilitarized zone (DMZ) to provide secure external access to the microgrid
- Secure the communication between the grid agent and resource agents
Required skills:
- Cyber-Security
- TCP/IP
- Familiarity with Linux
- C/C++
References:
[1] Bernstein, Andrey, et al. “A composable method for real-time control of active distribution networks with explicit power setpoints. Part I: Framework.”Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015): 254-264.
Supervisors: Maaz Mashood Mohiuddin