Iowa Board of Regents

ISU Engineers build zero-trust, real-time cybersecurity tools to protect renewables on the grid

The guardians of cyberinfrastructure call it “zero trust architecture.”

“Whenever a high level of security is required, zero trust is required,” said Manimaran Govindarasu, an Iowa State University Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering. “Verify all the time. Authenticate all the time, even though it is cumbersome.”

Say, for example, a grid operator is using a laptop to communicate with a grid’s control center. Even though that same laptop logged into the control center earlier in the day, it would still need to be verified.

“You can’t assume past authentication,” said Govindarasu, who’s also the Murray J. and Ruth M. Harpole Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a contributor to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory. “You always need to verify. Every transaction. Every connection needs to be verified.”

Govindarasu is leading a research project that will apply zero-trust ideas to energy infrastructure that includes distributed energy resources such as solar and wind farms or large-scale energy storage systems.

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