Privacy-Preserving, Collective Cyberattack Defense of DERs
Project Summary
This project aims to develop, apply, and test a technique for enabling collective defense of distribution grids with significant penetration of distributed energy resources (DER) and responsive loads (particularly Electric Vehicles), by leveraging a privacy-preserving method of data sharing without exposing raw data that might contain personally identifiable information (PII) from individual consumers or buildings or that might otherwise be considered national security information that could be leveraged by adversaries to more effectively compromise and potentially destabilize portions of the electric grid. We envision creating a software platform to allow utilities to share relevant cybersecurity information with one another in a manner that does not compromise the privacy of customers in their service territories. In doing so, we hope to reduce the reluctance of utilities to share information that can be used to harden other networks by reducing privacy-related liabilities associated with grid operational technology (OT) data.
This project is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) Risk Management Tools and Technologies (RMT) program.
DOE Press Release: “DOE Announces $39 Million in Research Funding to Enhance Cybersecurity of Clean Distributed Energy Resources,” September 12, 2023.
Principal Investigator:
Sean Peisert (PI; LBNL)
Co-Leads:
Daniel Arnold (Co-PI; LBNL)
Anna Scaglione (Co-PI; Cornell Tech)
Aram Shumavon (Co-PI; Kevala)
Vivek Kumar Singh (NREL)
Senior Personnel:
Pete Baker (Kevala)
Eli Kerr (Kevala)
Jason Macdonald (LBNL)
Chuck Moran (Kevala)
Postdocs:
Graduate Students:
Andrew Campbell (Cornell Tech)
Additional Researchers
Dr. Tong Wu (University of Central Florida)
Past Researchers:
Ryan Cryar (NREL)
Parth Pradhan (Kevala)
Nikhil Ravi (Ph.D., Cornell Tech, 2004 → finance sector)
Partners:
Cornell Tech
Kevala, Inc.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Press regarding this project:
Berkeley Lab Leading the Way with New Cybersecurity Projects — Nov. 6, 2023
Presentations relating to this project:
Sean Peisert, “LBNL Electric Grid Cybersecurity Research and Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure,” Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) Interagency Working Group (IWG) Meeting, May 23, 2024.
Presentations relating to this project:
Andrew Campbell, Anna Scaglione, and Sean Peisert, “Decentralized Differentially Private Power Method” (poster), Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy, Mountain View, CA, June 2-3, 2025.
Publications resulting from this project:
Hang Liu, Anna Scaglione, and Sean Peisert, ”Graph-Signal-to-Graph Matching for Network De-anonymization Attacks,”IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, accepted 14 Oct, 2024.
Sachin Kadam, Anna Scaglione, Nikhil Ravi, Sean Peisert, Brent Lunghino, and Aram Shumavon, “Optimum Noise Mechanism for Differentially Private Queries in Discrete Finite Sets,” Cybersecurity, 7(1):54, 25 September 2024.
Hang Liu, Anna Scaglione, and Sean Peisert, “Privacy Leakage in Graph Signal to Graph Matching Problems,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Seoul, South Korea, April 14–19, 2024.
Nikhil Ravi, Anna Scaglione, Sean Peisert, and Parth Pradhan, “Differentially Private Communication of Measurement Anomalies in the Smart Grid,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.02324, 4 Mar 2024.
More information is available on other Berkeley Lab research projects focusing on cybersecurity in general, as well as specifically on cybersecurity for energy delivery systems.