Cyber security in the emerging systems of the electrical sector

There are many forces that have led modern societies to embrace a new concept for the production and distribution of electricity in the future: the smart grid. They include the scarcity of fossil fuel and the ecological impact of current energy sources. The intelligence of the future grid will depend on the use of technologies of information and communication. Indeed they will be indispensable to meet the challenges of the new energy sources which are intermittent and distributed. The energy supply infrastructures are among the most critical for the modern world, and the reliability of the distribution is the most important requirement to be met. This implies that ensuring the IT security of the smart grid will be of pivotal importance. But this will only be feasible with a demanding and large effort to cope with the security issues, conducted in a determined way by the different sectors of our society, including government authorities and private organizations, research groups and in particular all the different actors that will take part in the new electric grid. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the security landscape of processes related with the management of command and control information and personal data in the context of the Smart Grid. Without entering into technical details that would distract us, we will discuss the purpose and use of smart technologies in the future grid, the risks associated with them, the security requirements that they must meet, and the means to implement them. We conclude that it is crucial to understand and treat the risks. This endeavour will convey a set of new challenges that our society will have to face