The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

Every business is guided almost entirely by money. The purpose of a business is to make money.

Organizations based on other incentives don't work, or work very poorly.

Attackers don't ask permission.

The hardware backdoor channel is present anyway because MPPT needs it.

The software can abuse the measurements to listen for optically transmitted commands.

> But you'll still need physical access to the supply chain to compromise it, and that's not possible for some hacker in a basement.

I forgot to respond to this sentence in the sibling response.

Supply chain attacks can be executed by intermediaries of the supply chain, or by manufacturers themselves: develop the capability to deny a foreign nation its energy infrastructure. The manufacturer is not a hacker in a basement. Manufacturers can be pressured by their local gorvernments, militaries, 3 letter agencies, ...

A precautionary principle would induce potential target nations to surreptitiously catalogue the inverter boards, sort them by most-GW serving type, and consider which control traces to cut to control the internal energy transfers in its inductors, capacitors, ... from a trusted parasite board. Just develop and test a few parasite boards for the most common inverters, and preferably have critical stock ready.

The main value in inverters is the power switches, inductors, capacitors, ... it would be cheaper to reroute the control to a trusted controller in the event of a calamity. We would survive fine, but it will be a painful few days.

Hurray! I have experience that may shed some insights. I worked on SCADA software (3 different ones), for about 15 years, started off as a Systems Engineer for an Industrial Power Metering company (but writing software), built drivers for various circuit breakers and other power protection devices, and wrote drivers and other software for IEC61850 (substation modelling and connectivity standard). I’ve been the technical director of one of these SCADA systems, and in charge of bringing the security to “zero trust”. I’ve been on the phone with the FBI (despite not being an American or in America), and these days I design and lead the security development at a large software company.

I’ve been out of the Power Industry/SCADA game for about 6 years now, and never had huge involvement with solar farms, so please take this with a large grain of salt, but here is my take. 15 years ago, all anyone would say about industrial networks was “air gap!”. Security within SCADA products was designed solely to prevent bad operators from doing bad things. Security on devices was essentially non-existent, and firmware could often be updated via the same connectivity that the SCADA system had to the devices (although SCADA rarely supported this; it was still possible). In addition, SCADA systems completely trusted communication coming back from the devices themselves, making it relatively simple for a rogue device to exploit a buffer overrun in the SCADA. After Stuxnet + a significant push from the US government, SCADA systems moved from “defensive boundary, trust internally” to “zero trust”. However, devices have a long, long service life. Typically they would be deployed and left alone for 10+ years, and generally had little to no security. Security researches left this space alone, because the cost of entry was too high, but anytime they did investigate a device, there were always trivial exploits.

Although SCADA (and other industrial control software), will be run on an isolated network, it will still be bridged in multiple places. This is in order to get data out of the system, but also to get data into the system (via devices, and off-site optimisation software). The other trend that happened over time was to centralize operations in order to have fewer operators controlling multiple sites. That means that compromising one network gives you access to a lot of real world hardware.

Engineers never trusted SCADA (wisely), and all of these systems would be well built with multiple fail-safes and redundancies and so on. However, if I were to be a state-actor, I’d target the SCADA. If you compromise that system, you have direct access to all devices and can potentially modify the firmware to do whatever you want. If there is security, the SCADA will be authorized.

I don’t think the security risks are overblown (they are overblown in what they think the real problems are). I think that as the systems have gotten ever more complex; we have such complicated interdependencies that it is impossible to deterministically analyse them completely. The “Northeast blackout of 2003” (where a SCADA bug lead to a cascade failure), was used as a case-study in this industry for many years, but if anything, I think the potential for intentional destruction is much higher.

clouds and rain do not behave the same as the sun.

What point are you trying to make here?