IBM, Infineon and others team on secure connected energy utilities
“Digitalization” and distributed power generation, say the partners, is fundamentally changing energy systems that have been centrally supplied to date. Solar photovoltaic assets, electric vehicles, electrical heating and cooling or battery storage have to be connected into an intelligent power system. At the same time, they must be protected against the growing number of security threats.
At the European Utilities Week in Amsterdam, 3-5 October 2017, the partners have demonstrated a first prototype solution, based on Infineon’s OPTIGA embedded security chips, built into icentic’s ICEHUB connectivity products, to authenticate devices that are connected to the Energy IoT platform by GreenCom.
Traditionally, solar photovoltaic inverters, heat pumps or batteries have not been designed to be digitally connected for monitoring, control and analytics purposes. Most such devices are not secured, and if connected to a digital infrastructure for the purposes of their management, are open to security threats. All the more so as access to data is happening at the infrastructure level as well as in the backend.
Infineon cites a recent study which found that 88% of energy infrastructure suppliers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland judge IT-security as the greatest challenge for a digitalized energy infrastructure. Yet the majority of the connected devices are not properly secured: attackers could be enabled to remotely compromise the device completely, control its flow of power and even cause a shut-down of the energy network.
The joint offering proposed by this cooperative effort addresses utilities and energy service companies that aim to offer new digital energy services to their customer base in an innovative yet secured way. It is also aimed at device manufacturers that either want to embed security into their energy-relevant assets from the beginning, or plan connectivity and security upgrades to enable additional value-added services of their installed devices.
GreenCom Networks’ Energy IoT platform integrates relevant analytical skills from IBM to forecast and optimize the usage of connected assets. IBM’s Hybrid Intelligence capabilities combine big data analytics, defined hardware-based security at the edge and GreenCom’s platform backend. icentic supplies and manages the required ICEHUB connectivity solution to connect distributed devices in a future-proof and secure way. The embedded security solution of Infineon’s OPTIGA family helps to securely authenticate the connected devices as well as to secure data transmission.
Infineon: www.infineon.com
IBM: https://www-935.ibm.com/industries/energy/index.html
GreenCom: www.greencom-networks.com/
icentic: https://icentic.com
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