Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid

Project Summary

The Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) is a $7.5M, 5-year project funded from the NSF's Cyber Trust initiative. Led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and involving researchers at Dartmouth, Cornell, and Washington State University, TCIP will aim to improve the way the power grid cyber infrastructure is built and maintained, making it more secure, reliable and safe. In some sense, the power grid is the infrastructure that drives all other infrastructures---but it is controlled by a cyber infrastructure that is brittle, unreliable, and distributed across harsh environment conditions and heterogeneous trust environments. The research will focus on four technical thrust areas: the computing base, data collection and control, wide-area information exchange, and quantitative validation. Prof. Sean Smith (Dartmouth) is leading the first area, building on his previous Dartmouth research and prior industrial experience in hardware techniques for trusted computing; Prof. David Nicol (former ISTS director) is leading the last one. Besides the NSF, the DoE and DHS have signed up to help fund this work.

• Principal Investigator: Sean W. Smith, Department of Computer Science
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• Funding: NSF-CyberTrust