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Senate passes bill to decrease grid digitization, move toward manual control
- inlined 7y agoThere’s a reason our nuclear system still operates on floppy disks.
- 96fps 7y agoFloppy-disk based systems are not the only way to ensure security/reliability, but it's far better than a half-baked system that isn't properly audited. Systems we rely on must be dead simple and reliable.
- minton 7y agoDo you have a source on this?
- lucasmullens 7y agoGoogle it, it seems to be a generally known fact: https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/us/pentagon-floppy-disks-nuclear/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/us/pentagon-floppy-disks-nucl...
- tntn 7y agohttps://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf Page 15.
- pfranz 7y agohttps://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/us/pentagon-floppy-disks-nuclear/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/us/pentagon-floppy-disks-nucl... It was a popular tech story a few years ago.
- floatingatoll 7y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?query=nuclear%20floppy&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nuclear%20floppy&sort=byPopula...
- dzhiurgis 7y agoThis is when I head off to n-gate.com
- drngdds 7y agoI'd assume that's more about not fixing something that isn't broken. (Because if you break it, you might accidentally annihilate humanity!)
- buboard 7y agoThere was no alternative to floppy disks when they were built though. Was there a deliberate choice to use an older technology?
- e2le 7y agoWhy not simply stop networking these systems together and/or connecting them to the internet?
- colechristensen 7y agoIt doesn't stop attacks. Stuxnet successfully attacked air gapped systems.
- the-pigeon 7y agoStill makes them exponentially harder since you need to get someone to connect an infected device to the internal network somehow.
- simonh 7y agoIt does stop attacks. It just doesn’t stop all attacks. Just because a security measure, by itself, isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t worth implementing.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y agoArguably that was a failure of physical or personnel controls. Someone was able to take media in. A physical device was allowed to be connected.
- beenBoutIT 7y agoIIRC, stuxnet successfully targeted and exploited weak humans. The air gap didn't fail, an idiot worker with a USB drive was the vector.
- antpls 7y agoMaybe there are still benefits to have a network, but not using internet. Couldn't we build a network with a subset of internet features but which are all formally proved, and let humans take care of the rest ?
- effie 7y ago
- kevan 7y agoThere's definitely some advantages to using age-old practices. It's easy to explain how trust and verification works in a system when 2 people have separate physical keys and you need both to perform an action. It's a lot harder to explain things like modern crypto to most people. Until a critical mass of the decision-making chain understand the tech we may be better off not using it for mission-critical things. Alternatively, this could also be a misguided effort that holds back smart-grid tech in America by a decade. It's really hard to tell.
- Finnucane 7y agoDoes smart-grid tech work any better than smart-home tech? So far most 'smart' tech hasn't had a good track record on security or reliability, certainly not at the level you would trust your major infrastructure to it.
- penagwin 7y agoKeep in mind most "smart home" technology is marketed at consumers who have no idea what SSL/TLS is (nore do many care sadly even though they should), and are meant to be as cheap as possible. While I have no clue what the security or reliability looks like in industrial applications, I would hope they evaluate their solutions with reliability in mind.
- mlaretallack 7y agoMost industrial application also done know or care what ssl/TLS is (however this is starting to change). I have had industrial control systems reboot by just doing an nmap scan.
- raverbashing 7y agoThis It's barely better than iot stuff. And some "older" systems probably still need NT4 to run (I mean, if you're lucky)
- andrewnicolalde 7y ago
- userbinator 7y agoGood to see some more "common-sense" in contrast to the "Internet everything" trend that's taken hold in some areas of the industry. Some of the control systems in the national grid have been in use for over a century, and are likely to continue working indefinitely if kept maintained.
- avip 7y agoWe need smart-gridness to reduce our dependency on idle fossil-burning power plants as a safety net to balance the now much less predictable grid. Strictly ecologically speaking, this seems problematic.
- probablypower 7y agoThis is an important point. Increasing renewable penetration into a power system leads to: -> reduced inertia -> increasing Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF) -> reduced time to react If you rely entirely on manual systems to react to frequency changes on a grid with high renewable energy penetration (e.g. the Irish grid), you'd really struggle to avoid daily blackouts without decommissioning a bunch of wind farms. It is by using such automated control schemes that countries like Ireland are able to push the limit on wind power penetration. If I was being truly cynical, I would think that a push towards mandating manual control (rather than mandating that it is available as a fallback) is actually a way to limit growth of the renewable energy sector.
- ethbro 7y agoOr, nuclear.
- rickycook 7y agodoes modern nuclear eschew digital controls? i mean... i’m sure they have manual cutoffs and sensors that humans monitor; can’t have some rogue hacker able to turn a nuclear plant into a huge catastrophe from the other side of the world and all... but i’d think they’d be largely automated to reduce human error?
- ethbro 7y agoParent was talking about the necessity of networked digital control systems to manage intermittent renewable sources. My point was that a grid comprised of a higher percentage of nuclear wouldn't need as advanced networked feedback, as sources wouldn't be turning on and off suddenly. Indeed there would be local digital monitoring and control with nuclear, but that's a much less risky threat vector.
- jmartrican 7y agoUS Gov taking steps to prevent the Butlerian Jihad before it even begins.
- flowerlad 7y agoIs it really necessary to go back to manual control? Or is it sufficient to use air-gapped systems? As North Korea’s hack of Sony shows, it is crazy to connect critical systems (and even some non-critical systems, movie making is hardly critical) to the open internet. But completely abandoning high tech is not the answer either!
- Havoc 7y agoGood thinking security wise but could be a serious setback for efficiency
- beenBoutIT 7y agoThey could still collect data locally and use ML to optimize it.
- jacquesm 7y agoEfficiency does not trump security for such installations.
- Nasrudith 7y agoIt may be an unpopular opinion but I disagree - security is a cognitively biased function owing to historical roots but it actually seldom comes up which fails to justify its costs and there is little incentive to gain from attacking it. Even if a bad actor did bring down the grid all it would do to concrete capabilities is GDP damage that they could easily get credit for and still leave a pissed off superpower able to make an example. Even actual rival status like say China were to do it would be shooting themselves in the foot such that something stupid and self destructive that if the PRC decided to simply start bombing Beijing it would do less damage. Besides for decades a few tens or hundreds of people could go out, buy semi automatic rifles and start casually shooting substations and walking or driving away until someone arrests them. That would cripple power infastructure far worse than any hacker could as it would take longer to replace and be a distribuited issue to fix. Given actual frequency even with lax security and pessimistic assumptions efficiency is a likely winner. Logistics and not superweapons win wars.
- Avamander 7y agoInstead of fixing the laws and forcing proper auditing there should rather be regression in scalability, response and monitoring?
- droithomme 7y agoVery good news. Mandate paper ballots next please.
- Whatarethese 7y agoPunch cards. Scantrons. Stone Age shit for elections.
- beenBoutIT 7y agoAnything that the public depends on for survival could be a great candidate for this type of restriction. Think of the hundreds of lives that would have been saved had this type of law been in place for airlines and their aircraft. A guy aware of the risks running himself into a tree in a Tesla is one thing, an unaware set of pilots with hundreds of passengers on a public aircraft is another.
- incompatible 7y agoSome accidents caused by automation failures would have been avoided, but how many others would have been caused by human failures?
- beenBoutIT 7y agoIf the automation is actively saving lives by correcting human failures then they need to log those events silently and forward them to whoever manages the pilots.
- IAmEveryone 7y agoSince 1970, air travel has increased by a factor of 7, while fatalities have decreased by >80%. Combine these figures and you get a safety improvement by a factor of about 70. We are clearly doing something right, and automated systems replacing error-prone humans may well be a part of it. I don’t quite get HN’s infatuation with the mythical perfect pilot.
- tlear 7y agoThis is very good news. Maybe few years late but better now. Current situation is a disaster waiting to happen Stuxney penetrated a heavily guarded, monitored, secured with air gap facility. US power grid systems are child’s play in comparison
- tomohawk 7y agoThis is a huge indictment of the IT industry. We need to kick the shiny rock mentality, and actually engineer systems that are safe and secure. Just look at how some companies interview and select people. They do so on the basis of cleverness, not carefulness and attention to detail.
- booleandilemma 7y agoThe attitude in the industry towards developers is pretty much: You know Java? Cool. My kid is learning that in high school.
- boogiewoogie 7y agoYou set the bar high. Some are more like, "Talk to this guy, he's a computer geek."
- jacquesm 7y ago> Just look at how some companies interview and select people. They do so on the basis of cleverness, not carefulness and attention to detail. That's a direct reflection of how we develop software. New and shiny trumps reliable and boring any day of the week. That, coupled with an industry that does not even recognize the concepts of liability and defective product is a surefire recipe for a very large disaster at some point in the future. And after that it will get a lot easier to get budget for security, testing and all those other things that companies see as unnecessary cost.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoEven if software were perfect, this makes sense as a defense-oriented decision. It's harder to hack a physical switch. Air gaps can be bridged. There are also plenty of reasons to automate things. It allows for for faster reactions to problems and interesting new ways to reroute power. Both approaches have pros and cons, and there are good reasons for backing either approach. Russia attacked Ukraine in a new way, and we responded by trying to become more well-defended against that new attack. Much as I agree that coding interviews are problematic, I fail to see how your point follows.
- rossdavidh 7y agoAs a person with two electrical engineering degrees and 15 years' experience as a professional programmer, I am nearly speechless at such a rational, foresighted, and prudent action coming from our government, in regards technology. It's like some bizarro-world where we have leaders who use the power of government to encourage industry to be careful and secure. I will wake up soon, and realize this was all a dream.
- ip26 7y agoI suppose a captured regulatory body is right twice a day
- craftinator 7y agoThis put a genuine smile on my face =p
- threezero 7y agoFor some reason this reminded me about the still-unsolved San Jose substation physical attack. The shooters did a lot of damage but didn’t interrupt much power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
- tantalor 7y agoThe opposite of "digital" is "analog", not "manual". The old phone networks were analog and vulnerable to cereal box whistles.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoThe difference between "digital" and "digitization" is "-al+ization" The new phone networks still operate using analog signals over a medium between digitizing modems.
- wtdata 7y agoAnalog can still be automated. The right word here is indeed manual since it needs human intervention.
- 2_listerine_pls 7y agoElectronics also need to be protected against EM weapons.
- buboard 7y agoJust hope this doesn't snowball This is quite an indictment of the security community.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoI have mixed feelings about this. In some ways it's a good idea but the demonization of "digital" is misguided. Some of us know how to build secure digital hardware and software but there are no incentives for companies to insist upon such designs, and there are many active disincentives for doing so. The incentive structure needs to be changed to fix this, and then the technology will follow. Demonizing a technology is short-sighted and dangerous.
- Whatarethese 7y agoThis seems like a terrible idea. Computer controlled systems lead to optimization and smarter decisions.
- rubidium 7y agoNot always in my experience. It’s balanced with “Out of sight out of mind”. There’s a benefit to making certain critical decisions manual, as it forces some review and awareness. Plus the current track records of internet security for physical control systems is terrible.
- liveoneggs 7y agoshould have used erlang?
- tootie 7y ago"bill that will study ways to replace automated systems with low-tech redundancies to protect the country's electric grid from hackers." The headline seems to be inferring more than the content is saying. The intent is not to rollback digitized systems, it's to decrease dependency on vulnerable systems. And the bill is only to commission a study on what systems could benefit from manual fallback, nothing is slated to be implemented yet.
- cududa 7y agoThank you for the only substantive comment here!
- CharlesMerriam2 7y agoThis is an important step in safe guarding our collective experience of power plants. Consider that the way we currently interact with power plants: "Someone needs to stay behind and manually make the boilers explode! I'll do it! Tell Laura I love her." pales in drama to "OK, let's see, Power / Input / Boiler / Max, confirm, confirm, confirm. OK, let's run!"
- vinay_ys 7y agoIt is quite alarming if we need to move away from digital connected tech for electrical grid monitoring and management. What about banks? What about hospitals? storage facilities? record keeping? These are the core underpinnings of a functioning society. We are already using digital-only systems for these. If these can be disrupted or corrupted, then society will come falling apart quickly. If we truly cannot secure a digital system for electrical grid and hence we should move away from digital, then we should be doing the same for these other critical systems as well. Is this even practical now? Shouldn't we be going down the path of inventing chips, systems, algorithms, protocols and proof methods to secure these systems?
- asperous 7y agoThere's probably an ideal system down the route of more high tech, but in the real world they would never be implemented perfectly. As complexity increases so does room for security issues. I don't see the problem with striking a balance with technology and putting in low-tech solutions for security reasons. So yeah I think many of those systems should implement similar measures.
- nwrk 7y agoIsn't this great success of 'Russia/China' so-called hacking ?
- Corrado 7y agoThis reminds me of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot. All of the ships in the fleet are modern and get hacked and taken over by an outside force. The "Galactica" is being decommissioned because it's old and it's systems are linked in with the rest of the fleet. Hence it is able to withstand the attack and save humanity.
- spacemanmatt 7y agoWe are capable of protecting our assets. We just have an administration that prefers to sacrifice efficiency to lock in a dying energy industry.