Trust research to address uncertainty in security for the smart grid

Perfect authentication is unachievable at the scales required for the smart grid, but we continue to design systems as if it had been achieved. Our ongoing research, using a viewpoint inspired by the concept of trust, along with results from decision theory, is attempting to provide a foundation for system design that explicitly addresses uncertainty of authentication. Although progress on the mathematical theory thus far is promising, a great deal more work is needed to understand how (or even whether) real-world behavior and experience can be modeled in the theory to make it useful in practice.