Smart Grids and Energy Storage Systems: Powering the Future of Energy In today’s rapidly evolving energy landscape, the push towards sustainability, efficiency, and reliability is stronger than ever. Traditional power grids, though robust in their time, are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of a modern, digital, and environmentally conscious society. This is where smart grids and energy storage systems (ESS) come into play — revolutionizing how electricity is generated, distributed, and consumed. What is a Smart Grid? A smart grid is an advanced electrical network that uses digital communication, automation, and real-time monitoring to optimize the production, delivery, and consumption of electricity. Unlike conventional grids, which operate in a one-way flow (from generation to end-user), smart grids enable a two-way flow of information and energy. Key Features of Smart Grids: Real-time monitoring of power usage and quality. Automated fault detection and rapid restoration. Int...
Fire walling to Protect Systems and Networks
* Firewalls are devices (or sometimes software) that sits on the border between two securities domains and monitor/log activity between them, sometimes avoiding the traffic that can pass between them based on certain criteria.
* For example a firewall router may permit HTTP: requests to pass through to a web server inside a company domain while not allowing telnet, ssh, or other traffic to pass through.
* A common architecture is to place a de-militarized zone, DMZ, which arrange of sits "between" the company domain and the outside world, as shown below. Company computers can extend either the DMZ or the outside world, but outside computers can only extend the DMZ. Perhaps most importantly, the DMZ cannot extend any of the other company computers, so even if the DMZ is breached, the attacker cannot get to the balance of the company network. (In some cases the DMZ may have restricted access to company computers, such as a web server on the DMZ that reqires to query a database on one of the other company computers.)
* Firewalls themselves required to be resistant to attacks, and unfortunately have several vulnerabilities:
o Tunneling, which includes encapsulating forbidden traffic inside of packets that
are allowed?
o Denial of service affects addressed at the firewall itself.
o Spoofing, in which an illegal host sends packets to the firewall with the
return address of an authorized host.
* In extra to the normal firewalls protecting a company internal network from the outside world, there are also some specialized forms of firewalls that have been recently developed:
o A personal firewall is a software layer that guards an individual computer. It may be a part of the operating system or a unique software package.
o An application proxy firewall understands the protocols of a specific service and acts as a stand-in (and relay) for the particular service. For example, and SMTP proxy firewall would take SMTP requests from the outside world, examine them for security concerns, and forward only the "safe" ones on to the real SMTP server behind the firewall.
o XML firewalls examined XML packets only, and reject ill-formed packets. Similar
firewalls exist for other specific protocols.
o System call firewalls protects the boundary between user mode and system mode, and delete any system calls that infringe security policies.