Planning IUCRC at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Center for Infrastructure Trustworthiness in Energy Systems (CITES)

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Perhaps more than any other piece of critical infrastructure, today's power delivery systems are critical to the welfare of the country and its citizens. All other systems, from agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing to telecommunications are dependent on safe, reliable delivery of power. Faulty systems, as in the case of the northeastern US failures of 1965, environmental factors, as in the northeastern US failures of 2003, physical attacks, as in the 2013 northern California outages, or cyber attacks, as in the 2015 attacks in Ukraine, have all led to human suffering and loss of productivity as the result of this interdependence. The Center for Infrastructure Trustworthiness in Energy Systems (CITES) IUCRC will enable our nation to limit impact of these cyber-physical attacks on national security by providing capabilities that: seek to prevent such attacks, rapidly detect attacks that do occur, enable robust infrastructure that continues to operate in the presence of such attacks, and quickly restore the nation's infrastructure after attack.Historically, as the systems that controlled energy delivery systems (EDS) became more complex, their components became increasingly interconnected. Systems originally intended for closed, serial systems were exposed to adversarial environments without state-of-the-art designs for cybersecurity; merely connecting to such services was often enough to exert complete control over the processes they oversee. While the modern EDS designs are fully aware of these limitations, after substantial academic research and industry infrastructure investment, the legacy of such systems persists. CITES seeks to address these legacy implications through a unique academic and industry partnership aimed at: (i) ensuring that legacy systems and providers continue to learn from the nascent science of cybersecurity and failures and improvements in other domains; and (ii) addressing the unique nature of threats to the critical EDS infrastructure. These dual goals require tightly integrated research and industry partnerships to solve not only the problems as they exist today, but to insure the continued reliability of our nation's EDS infrastructure.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.