[Cryptography] Smart electricity meters can be dangerously insecure, warns expert

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2017, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

> I can't help with that, but I have further hearsay evidence. A number of 
> years ago, I spent a week working on some modeling problem related to 
> the UK electrical grid, and an engineer I talked to at the time told me 
> that nobody really knows how to restart the grid if it crashes. Or more 
> precisely, it has never been tried. The grid has been operating 
> continuously since World War II, and while they have all sorts of 
> procedures worked out for restoring the grid should it ever crash, this 
> is something you clearly don't get to practice like you do fire drills. 
> No specific time estimates were mentioned, but he was clearly quite 
> concerned about it, and it was clear that the procedure would be quite 
> involved.

I am reliably informed by somebody who worked in the NSW Australia power 
industry that no-one knows how to do a "black start", because all of the 
grey-beards have retired or passed.

As you point out, who's going to *really* test a black-out?  One of my 
favourite sayings, back when I was installing computer systems, was 
"there's only one way to test the UPS" and I pulled the main breaker 
myself (because nobody else would).  Yes, the UPS worked :-)

We are losing vital information at an uncomfortable rate...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."