3 ms·
Yes. The biggest risk is of process controllers being reconfigured to cause physical damage. For instance, gas turbines can be cranked up to speeds & temperatur
by tlb 10y ago
Yes. The biggest risk is of process controllers being reconfigured to cause physical damage. For instance, gas turbines can be cranked up to speeds & temperatures at which the turbine blades disintegrate. Or you can shut off combustion but keep fuel flowing, then restart combustion and get an explosion in the exhaust system.
Why not just design equipment to have analog fail-safes? To get the last few percent of efficiency out of many systems you have to push them beyond what can be simply protected with fuses and analog shutoffs, and depend on software.
Nuclear reactors can't just be turned off. You have to keep the cooling pumps running or the core overheats.
Solar thermal farms can be hacked to point all the mirrors wrong and melt the tower.
Large windmills have very complicated wind speed/blade angle controls, and can be made to disintegrate in minutes with the right inputs.
All the effects I mentioned are local to one system. It's not clear if there's an attack that depends on the dynamics of the overall grid. But I can understand why researchers focus on the largest possible abstraction, rather than writing detailed engineering papers about turbine failure modes.
- mjevans 10y agoActually it depends heavily on the design of the reactor. I recall that more modern designs have either far higher or complete degrees of 'passive' safety. The very heat of the reactor being sufficient to circulate the cooling loop at a safe level. Really we should be planning for the active replacement of //ALL// infrastructure within it's designed service lifetime or less (since invariably it'll take longer than initially estimated to accomplish).
- m_mueller 10y agoModern designs do that, but paradoxically it's the political environment of anti-nuclear fearmongering that makes it impossible to switch to them.