Cybersecurity Interoperability Project Reaches Milestone

  • May 26, 2011

EnerNex, prime contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded Lemnos project, announces cybersecurity interoperability testing, June 1-2 at the Electric Power Research Institute Smart Grid Substation Lab in Knoxville, Tenn.

The focus of this testing will be on using security protocols - IPsec, SSH, LDAP and Syslog - in a multi-vendor environment.

This event is the next milestone in an ongoing process that will culminate in an open forum, in mid-August, to provide the larger utility and vendor community with an opportunity to collaborate and validate the work of the Lemnos project. Ultimately, the work of Lemnos is to produce an open and interoperable security solution effective for utility control systems environments. The event in early June will be an initial task by the project team and the participating vendors in preparation for the mid-August forum.

“EnerNex is pleased to have the opportunity to bring together and manage an amazing group of partners to develop this platform. This serves not only as the basis for secure field device critical infrastructure, but also serves as a shining example of the value that standards based interoperability can bring to the industry in general,” said Erich Gunther, EnerNex chairman and chief technology officer, and chairman of the UCA International Users Group.

One of the goals of Lemnos is to help two-way communication and foster relationships between vendors and utilities as they look to effectively secure the control systems within the electric power industry.

Lemnos is a multi-year project under DOE’s Cybersecurity for Energy Delivery Systems Research and Development Program. The project identifies basic cybersecurity functions needed within the utility control system environment and then selects open source solutions, namely Internet Engineering Task Force Request For Comment (RFC), to support these functions. Once identified, a specific instantiation of each RFC, called an Interoperable Configuration Profile, suitable for the electric utility control system environment is developed and documented and its effectiveness is verified with comprehensive testing.

The core Lemnos project team receiving the DOE award includes:

  • EnerNex
  • Tennessee Valley Authority
  • Sandia National Laboratories
  • Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories

Additional participants in the project include, EPRI and vendors such as Cisco, Encore Networks, GarrettCom, n-dimension and RuggedCom, which are participating in the June and August testing. Other vendors such as Siemens, Phoenix Contact and Industrial Defender have participated in past project testing.

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