Secured Microgrid Operation for Military Facilities - Findings from a Crowd Hacking Event

Microgrids can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cost of electricity while increasing resiliency. This is especially relevant for critical infrastructure such as military facilities where on-site renewable generation can reduce or eliminate the reliance on external fuel supply, and therefore increase mission critical resilience. Advanced microgrid controllers operate by forecasting on-site renewable generation and loads throughout the day to compute optimal setpoints for balancing resources such as batteries. In order to reliably compute these forecasts, weather forecast data from the National Weather Service is commonly used. The forecast is downloaded from the public internet, which could lead to vulnerability of the critical infrastructure. This work summarizes the findings from an exhibition at a large cybersecurity conference and crowd hacking event where participants were invited to exploit this external data flow in the context of microgrid control. A total of 232 malicious attempts were recorded with 92.4 % blocked by primary safety measures. The remaining 7.6 % of attempts did breach cybersecurity measures, but did not effect operation of the microgrid.