As part of a public-private partnership focused on cyber security in the electric sector, the College of Technology will receive $237,000 in research funding over a three-year contract period.
The University of Houston is a member of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)-led National Energy Sector Cybersecurity Organization (NESCO) Resources team established by the U.S. Department of Energy, and has been selected to be the lead ambassador for workforce, education and training on the project. The COT principal investigator for this work is Dr. Art Conklin, waconkli [at] uh.edu (waconkli[at]uh[dot]edu).
As part of the resources team within NESCO, COT faculty will assist in detailed analysis of the security and privacy issues in the various domains of the electric sector on an ongoing basis and under the guidance of an NESCO Industry Advisory Board. The work will be split into three working groups (including NESCO team and industry volunteers) with the following high level technical tasks:
- Identify vulnerabilities, develop risk mitigation strategies, best practices and metrics in collaboration
- Review NIST, NERC and other cyber security requirements and results and assess existing power system and cyber security standards to meet the security requirements of the power system
- Test security technologies in EPRI substation lab, INL National SCADA Test Bed, etc.