Cloud Computing for the Power Grid: From Service Composition to Assured Clouds

The electric power industry is one of the few industries where cloud computing has not yet found much adoption, even though electric power utilities rely heavily on communications and computation to plan, operate and analyze power systems. In this paper we explore the reasons for this phenomenon. We identify a variety of power system applications that could benefit from cloud computing. We then discuss the security requirements of these applications, and explore the design space for providing the security properties through application layer composition and via assured cloud computing. We argue that a combination of these two approaches will be needed to meet diverse application requirements at a cost that can justify the use of cloud computing.

[1]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Toward a reliable, secure and fault tolerant smart grid state estimation in the cloud , 2013, 2013 IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT).

[2]  Dagmar Niebur,et al.  Load profile estimation in electric transmission networks using independent component analysis , 2003 .

[3]  Jun Zhu,et al.  Breaking up is hard to do: security and functionality in a commodity hypervisor , 2011, SOSP.

[4]  Craig Gentry,et al.  Computing arbitrary functions of encrypted data , 2010, CACM.

[5]  Benjamin Farley,et al.  Resource-freeing attacks: improve your cloud performance (at your neighbor's expense) , 2012, CCS.

[6]  M. Henderson,et al.  Power system planning process and issues , 2009, 2009 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting.

[7]  Michael K. Reiter,et al.  Cross-VM side channels and their use to extract private keys , 2012, CCS.

[8]  Daniel K. Molzahn,et al.  Confidentiality-preserving optimal power flow for cloud computing , 2012, 2012 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton).

[9]  Steven Hand,et al.  Improving Xen security through disaggregation , 2008, VEE '08.

[10]  Zhi Wang,et al.  HyperSafe: A Lightweight Approach to Provide Lifetime Hypervisor Control-Flow Integrity , 2010, 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[11]  Benjamin Hindman,et al.  Dominant Resource Fairness: Fair Allocation of Multiple Resource Types , 2011, NSDI.

[12]  Hovav Shacham,et al.  Hey, you, get off of my cloud: exploring information leakage in third-party compute clouds , 2009, CCS.

[13]  Abhinav Srivastava,et al.  Self-service cloud computing , 2012, CCS '12.

[14]  Benjamin Farley,et al.  More for your money: exploiting performance heterogeneity in public clouds , 2012, SoCC '12.

[15]  Jennifer Rexford,et al.  Eliminating the hypervisor attack surface for a more secure cloud , 2011, CCS '11.

[16]  P. Mell,et al.  The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing , 2011 .