Today and tomorrow I’m participating with about 150 others in the Dept. of Energy’s Cyber Security Research Needs for Open Science Workshop, and a significant portion of this is related to control system research needs. The workshop is sponsored by Office of Science (Advanced Scientific Computing Research) and Office of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability.

The goal of the workshop is to develop Priority Research Directions (PRD’s) for the Dept. of Energy that identify research needs for opportunities in cyber security for open science, and follows a similar workshop that was held in January with a smaller, more DoE group.

There are a few things that are unique here:

• PRD’s are aimed at research that will produce results in 3 to 10 years (and some have said 5 to 10 years). They are not looking for research PRD’s that will provide near-term, operational results. These have already been funded by other programs. This will be an interesting challenge for me, because Digital Bond’s focus and raison d’etre for research programs is to make an significant near term impact. It is always a good idea to break up typical thought patterns, so I’m looking forward to these break out discussions.
• The PRD’s must be focused on “Open Science” which I’m not sure exactly what this means. One quote was “Open Science means that potentially everyone can participate”. It is significantly different than the 0 - 3 year research where commercialization plans are a major driver.

After the introductions that start the day, participants will breakout in four sessions:

• Securing Hardware, Software and Data
• Monitoring and Detection
• Future Security Technologies and Information Assurance Technologies
• Human Factors Analysis
• Protecting our Utility Architecture