Toward Automated Enforcement of Cyber-Physical Security Requirements for Energy Delivery Systems

The innovation and advances in power delivery and information technologies are bringing unmatched changes to energy delivery systems (EDS), automating the management and administration of mission-critical infrastructures, such as the power grid, the oil, and gas industries. While the benefits of these changes are unparalleled, cyberattacks at EDS are also at unprecedented levels, which may lead to consequences ranging from power outages to homeland security breaches. To securely connect and integrate large quantities of these components, the energy community has proposed roadmaps to update the way to plan and operate EDS. These roadmaps come with security requirements that specify the best practices along with regulations EDS and utility should comply with. However, there is a huge gap between these requirements and the actual enforcement. In this paper, we envision a framework that automates the security requirement enforcement so that natural language policies can be enforced without human intervention and with high confidence.