Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) Center - Overview

In the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) Center, which is housed in the University of Illinois Information Trust Institute, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dartmouth College, Cornell University, and Washington State University are together addressing the challenge of how to protect the nation's power grid by significantly improving the way the power grid infrastructure is built, making it more secure, reliable, and safe.

This National Science Foundation-funded center-scale project, which also has support from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, recognizes that today's quality of life depends on the continuous functioning of the nation's electric power infrastructure, which in turn depends on the health of an underlying computing and communication network infrastructure that is at serious risk from both malicious cyber attacks and accidental failures. These risks may come from cyber hackers who gain access to control networks or create denial of service attacks on the networks themselves, or from accidental causes, such as natural disasters or operator errors.

TCIP's research plan is focused on securing the low-level devices, communications, and data systems that make up the power grid, to ensure trustworthy operation during normal conditions, cyber-attacks, and power emergencies.

Impact is being made at all levels in the project, with a wide range of research results that have developed into fruitful interactions with electric industry partners and participation in major national Smart Grid initiatives. Accomplishments to date include an array of over 15 hardware and software solutions, including one of the most efficient known techniques for protecting message exchanges in existing, already-deployed power systems and a strategy for managing complex security policies in large networks that may have thousands of rules controlling who can access what. TCIP has also addressed the security weakness of smart meters through development of an "attestation" strategy that can detect modifications to software on the meters, thus helping to block attacks and also thwart customers who try to lower their power bills by tampering with their meters. In addition, TCIP experts have recently been asked to contribute to a national technology rollout effort by evaluating the security of a proposed power grid security standard.

The TCIP Center is also engaged in a wide variety of education-related activities. Most notably, they have prepared a series of applets (with accompanying educational materials) that are suitable for middle-school-level education about power, and in 2008 they held the first Cyber Security for Process Control Systems Summer School.