Some of the team members from the TCIP initiative were at the Dept of Energy Open Science meeting. This five year, $7.5M program is funded by the NSF with involvement of DHS and DoE. It has been up for almost two years now and has been relatively quiet in terms of publicity as compared to I3P.

So we took a look at it and started a SCADApedia page on TCIP. Most of the available output to date is a set of one-page “posters”, but there are some related papers on the site and the researchers from TCIP indicated there would be many more papers coming.

The project is on the broad topic of “cyber”, but security is mentioned prominently in the project area descriptions. I need to spend some time with these papers. Here are some projects that caught my eye:

• Attack Container - A lightweight anomaly detection capability distributed in IED’s.
• Attested Metering - A security architecture and simulation for AMR
• A series of papers on Gridstat - a middleware framework for real-time data exchange. There are a number of security and QoS programs under the Gridstat umbrella.

There were quite a few projects that seemed to be a waste of time, but that is to be expected in research especially with those new to this field. Also, that is only my opinion, sometimes you never know where a brilliant idea will come from.

My biggest criticism of this program, I3P and many others is any good work done rarely sees the light of day. Without this we are essentially paying money to educate grad students which is not a bad thing, but a lot more can be done with the 10’s of millions spent.

TCIP appears to be a bit better as at least technical papers are being made available. It would be even better if the code and tools were provided for the community.