The Department of Energy on Thursday awarded $12 million in new university grants for the research, development and demonstration of cybersecurity technology to detect and mitigate threats to the nation’s power grid.
The six university-led teams are being funded by DoE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response to advance anomaly detection, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and physics-based analytics to strengthen the security of energy systems and will include efforts to quickly detect cyber intrusions and automatically block access to control functions.
The energy sector is a primary target for Russian cyber-attacks, U.S. officials have warned.
“As the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, no issue keeps me up at night more than our nation’s cyber vulnerabilities, especially those that may exist within the critical infrastructure sectors that power our nation,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a statement.
The six teams, which each received about $2 million, include Florida International Univ., which will develop AI-based detection tools and design effective cyber threat mitigation strategies, Iowa State Univ., which will use AI-integrated, attack-resilient and proactive system technologies for defense-in-depth of cyber-physical systems, New York Univ., which will develop Tracking Real-time Anomalies in Power Systems to detect and localize anomalies in power grids, Texas A&M, which will use AI/ML to develop techniques and scalable prototypes for intrusion response against advanced cyber-physical threats, the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago to develop a resilient, next-generation solid-state power substation, and Virginia Tech, which will create the Cyber Resilience of SubsTation (CREST) to detect and mitigate cyber incidents while maintaining secure communication and critical functions.