Monday, June 26, 2017

Update on OPC UA IEC 61850 Companion Specification

The OPC UA IEC 61850 Companion Specification of the OPC Foundation is focusing on gateways that are intended to be used to transfer information fully and accurately through gateways between devices that implement IEC 61850 or OPC UA respectively.
While IEC 61850 is focusing on electricity generation, transmission, distribution, distributed energy resources (DER), and consumption, OPC UA is dealing with non-electrical industrial process activities. It is clear that users require integration of the electrical aspects of a plant with non-electrical aspects.
The information models defined in IEC 61850 were focused during the late 90s on protection and automation of electric power systems. In the meantime the models provide a huge number logical nodes (e.g., STMP = Supervision of temperature with measurement, alarms and trips, or FPID = PID loop control) applicable in most non-electrical applications domains. The communication services (Reporting, Logging, GOOSE, Control, Setting Group Control, ...) are generic for any application domain.
OPC UA’s modelling capabilities is understood to make it possible to transfer data between different systems without losing the semantics of data. Thus the drafted companion specification document describes how IEC 61850 data can exchanged using OPC UA data modelling and services.
Click HERE for more information.
IEC TC 88 PT 25 is currently working on a technical specification: 
Wind turbines - IEC 61400-25-41: Communications for monitoring and control of wind power plants - Mapping to communication profile based on IEC 62541 (OPC UA)
Microsoft has provided an Open-Source OPC UA stack to OPC Foundation! 
The new OPC Foundation .NET reference stack, based on the new .NET Standard Library technology, was developed and optimized by Microsoft to serve as the complete platform-independent infrastructure, from the embedded world to the cloud. This new version is enabled on the following supported platforms: Various Linux distributions, iOS, Android, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Phone, HoloLens and the Azure cloud.
Click HERE for the press news from the OPC Foundation.
Click HERE for accessing the open source reference stack at Gidhub.
Brief comparison of IEC 61850 and OPC UA:
Standard? Yes for both in IEC.
Available since? IEC 61850 for some 15 years; OPC UA for a few years.
SCADA support? Yes for both.
Real-time support? Yes in IEC 61850; OPC UA is intended to run on TSN (IEEE 802).
Security? Yes for both (IEC 61850 refers to IEC 62351).
Semantic? IEC 61850 has huge, still growing list of models; OPC UA has not yet semantics.
Configuration Language? IEC 61850 has SCL (System Configuration Language); OPC UA has no.
Conformance testing? Yes for both.
Support: By many big and small companies.
Open Source Stack? Yes for IEC 61850 (http://libiec61850.com); yes for OPC UA (from Microsoft, see above).


Wednesday, June 14, 2017

How to Model Thousands of Measurement Signals?

The standard series IEC 61850 was originally developed for high voltage substation automation and protection ... with well defined logical nodes and data objects representing the most crucial signals like status (CSWI.stVal), 3-phase electrical measurements (MMXU.V.phsA ...), temperature supervision (STMP.Tmp, STMP.Alm, ...) and many other signals.
Several applications require huge number of values, e.g.,
  1. Logs (hundreds of status changes over a long period)
  2. Power Quality measurements (hundreds of values of min, max, ...)
  3. Temperature (hundreds or thousands of raw measured or processed values)
The corresponding logical nodes and communication service models would end-up in a lot of overhead in the modelling or in the communication.
I have discussed the first two bullets already inside the standardization groups ... more details may be discussed in a future blog post.
Today, I will discuss the third issue: huge amount of temperature values.
First of all, there are two models for temperature: TTMP (Transducer for a single sensor value) and STMP (Supervision of a single temperature value) with the following excerpt of details:

TTMP.TmpSv.instMag and TTMP.TmpSv.q are the two mandatory data attributes.

STMP.Tmp.mag.f, STMP.Tmp.mag.q, STMP.Tmp.mag.t (Tmp is optional)
STMP.Alm.stVal, STMP.Alm.q, STMP.Alm.t (Alm is optional)
STMP.Trip.stVal, STMP.Trip.q, STMP.Trip.t (Trip is optional)
Second, If you want to communicate just hundreds of temperature values, I would model this application as follows (SIUnits and sample rate ... may be modeled as well):
[Sure, I am aware that multiple instances of TmpSv are not yet standardized ... I would not care a lot at the moment ... it will come anyway. If not, define an extended Data Object TmpSamp with multiplicity 0..*]
TTMP1.
TmpSv1.instMag and TmpSv1.q
TmpSv2.instMag and TmpSv2.q
TmpSv3.instMag and TmpSv3.q
...
TmpSv100.instMag and TmpSv100.q
DataSet="DsTTMP1"
FCDA=TmpSv1.instMag
FCDA=TmpSv2.instMag
FCDA=TmpSv3.instMag
...
FCDA=TmpSv100.instMag
Unbuffered Report CB="UnbTTMP1
Data Set="DsTTMP1" 
trigger option: integrity period 
period: 1 h or ...
----------------------------------------------
TTMP2.
TmpSv1.instMag and TmpSv1.q
TmpSv2.instMag and TmpSv2.q
TmpSv3.instMag and TmpSv3.q
...
TmpSv100.instMag and TmpSv100.q
DataSet="DsTTMP2"
FCDA=TmpSv1.instMag
FCDA=TmpSv2.instMag
FCDA=TmpSv3.instMag
...
FCDA=TmpSv100.instMag
Unbuffered Report CB="UnbTTMP2
Data Set="DsTTMP2" 
trigger option: integrity period 
period: 1 h or ...
---------------------------------------------
TTMP3.
TmpSv1.instMag and TmpSv1.q
TmpSv2.instMag and TmpSv2.q
TmpSv3.instMag and TmpSv3.q
...
TmpSv100.instMag and TmpSv100.q
DataSet="DsTTMP3"
FCDA=TmpSv1.instMag
FCDA=TmpSv2.instMag
FCDA=TmpSv3.instMag
...
FCDA=TmpSv100.instMag
Unbuffered Report CB="UnbTTMP3
Data Set="DsTTMP3" 
trigger option: integrity period 
period: 1 h or ...
---------------------------------------------
Third, If you want to use hundreds of temperature values AND alarms AND trips etc. then STMP would be the right choice. The above modeling approach would be the same.
In addition to the data sets for the measured values, you may also configure data sets for the quality "q", and configure report control blocks with trigger option "data change". You may also add the quality into the other FCDAs ... depending on how crucial the quality is for the client application.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Are Blackouts Knocking at the Doors of Substations?

Dear experts interested in secure power delivery systems,
You may have been informed yesterday about one of the latest developments in destroying the power delivery infrastructure: Industroyer.
What is Industroyer? It is "A new threat for industrial control systems" according to Anton Cherepanov (ESET):
"Win32/Industroyer is a sophisticated piece of malware designed to disrupt
the working processes of industrial control systems (ICS), specifically
industrial control systems used in electrical substations.
Those behind the Win32/Industroyer malware have a deep knowledge
and understanding of industrial control systems and, specifically, the
industrial protocols used in electric power systems. Moreover, it seems very
unlikely anyone could write and test such malware without access to the
specialized equipment used in the specific, targeted industrial environment.
Support for four different industrial control protocols, specified in the
standards listed below, has been implemented by the malware authors:
• IEC 60870-5-101 (aka IEC 101)
• IEC 60870-5-104 (aka IEC 104)
• IEC 61850
• OLE for Process Control Data Access (OPC DA)
In addition to all that, the malware authors also wrote a tool that
implements a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against a particular family of
protection relays, ..."

Click HERE for a comprehensive report [pdf].

The Conclusion of the report closes with this statement:

"The commonly-used industrial control protocols used in this malware
were designed decades ago without taking security into consideration.
Therefore, any intrusion into an industrial network with systems using
these protocols should be considered as “game over”."

The protocols used are not the crucial issue! The protocols like IEC 61850 could be protected by the accompanying standard series IEC 62351 (Power systems management and associated information exchange - Data and communications security).
One crucial show stopper is: "Stingy is cool" mentality!!
Securing the systems could be implemented - with far higher costs during development, engineering, configuration, OPERATION, and maintenance.
As long as we all do not accept that the electric power (and other) infrastructures will require a lot more resources to keep the level of today's availability, quality, and security, we will experience more disrupted infrastructures.
Building an infrastructure, operating, and maintaining it are different aspects. The maintenance of our infrastructures will consume definitely more resources than we believe today.
I was shocked to read, that some "friends" believe that the reports about the "Industroyer" are just fake news.
Whatever you believe, one thing is really true: Many systems and devices in the automation domain (substations, ...) are not protected! Believe me!

Saturday, June 10, 2017

CIM-Workshop am 19. Oktober 2017 in Frankfurt

Die DKE lädt zum CIM (Common Information Model)-Workshop 2017 ein!

Ort: Frankfurt/Main
Datum: 19. Oktober 2017

Mit vielen spannenden Themen, u.a.
  • Eine Kurzeinführung in CIM 
  • Viele Anwendungsbeispiele 
  • Vorstellung des Themas CIM in Verteilnetze, Niederspannung 
  • „Life Hack“ – Wir bauen einen Kundenanschluss… 
  • Rolle von CIM in verschiedenen Projekten 
  • Referenzmodelle und CIM 
  • Podiumsdiskussion mit den Themen CIM Blick in die Zukunft, Blockchain, … 
Hier für weitere Informationen klicken.
Introduction to CIM

Thursday, June 8, 2017

What is your Annual Cybersecurity Incident Bill?

"Although the majority of industrial organizations believe they are well-prepared for cybersecurity incidents, this confidence may be not well-founded: every second ICS company experienced between one and five incidents last year, according to a survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab. On average, ineffective cybersecurity costs industrial organizations up to $497K per year."

Click HERE to read more details.

Many ICS (Industrial Control Systems) are also used in power system applications. So, what is the situation there? Likely similar to the industrial domain.