EU regulations require member nations to ensure that 80% of residential households will be fitted with Smart Grid nodes, also known as smart meters by 2020.
Following these regulations, utility companies have allocated a lot of effort to install smart meters into millions of homes across Europe.
However, besides the benefits of such an endeavor, the power grid, which is a vital economic and social infrastructure, will be exposed to security threats inherited from the ICT sector, while privacy issues and new vulnerabilities, related to the specific characteristics of the SG infrastructure, will emerge. Currently existing works contain vulnerabilities in crucial processes and do not utilize state of the art technologies.
Considering the above, SealedGRID aims at bringing together experts from industry and academia from cross-sectorial research areas having complementary background with the long-term goal to design, analyze, and implement a scalable, highly trusted and interoperable Smart Grid security platform. The SealedGRID is an innovative platform, builds on a realistic architectural image of industrial installations considering the special characteristics of energy infrastructures, their cyber and physical requirements. The SealedGRID objectives are the following:
- To contribute to the fulfilment of the objective of efficient operation of critical infrastructure, while preserving quality of service, for the ultimate benefit of customers.
- To provide an integrated solution that will be applicable to existing systems as well.
- To provide advanced security features in legacy equipment upgrading their capabilities for operation in modern computing environment.
- To limit the security risks for the expansion of remote energy distribution network management, towards the evolution of Smart Grid.
- To provide a platform that will abide by the existing standardization work and will be directly utilized by the shareholders to provide new tools towards a scalable, highly trusted, and interoperable Smart Grid security platform.
