Abstract: In the last ten years the energy sector as significantly increased its data collection capabilities. Along with that, the issue of data privacy has been exacerbated, particularly due to a growing amount of measurements collected in distribution systems. These data can reveal users behavior and expose retail market vulnerabilities, such as times of congestion in the system. At the same time, allowing the analysis of measurements data can help in the development of third parties technologies for responsive loads, in buildings and in electrified transportation, and can spur greater investment in the deployment renewable energy, by highlighting market opportunities. Finally, because the tie-lines of the physical grid allows failures to spread across management boundaries, we argue that sharing information across such boundaries and with government agencies can alert about security threats. The electric power sector is trying to codify policies, such as the 15 x 15 rule, to regulate the publication of utility data statistics. As we explain in this talk, the approach is ineffective in protecting privacy if repeated queries are allowed. In fact, that is exactly the type of issue that differential privacy mechanisms are designed to address. In this talk we will review the differential privacy framework and focus on its tailored application to querying electric power systems data. Specifically, we will provide examples in which differentially private mechanisms can be optimized for queries of interest in the energy sector, in the sense of giving the best trade-off in terms of privacy and accuracy of the query response. We will also show that the use of such mechanisms can help design differentially private databases for further analysis and for research.

Speaker’s Bio: Anna Scaglione (M.Sc.'95, Ph.D. '99) is currently a professor in electrical and computer at Cornell Tech, the New York City campus of Cornell University, Prior to that she held faculty positions at Arizona State University, the University of California at Davis, Cornell University (the first time) and the University of New Mexico. She is IEEE fellow since 2011 and received the 2013, IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, the 2000 IEEE Signal Processing Transactions Best Paper Award the NSF CAREER grant (2002). She is co-recipient with her students of several best student papers awards at conferences and received the 2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award with one of the PhD students. She was Distinguished Lecturer of the Signal Processing Society in 2019 and 2020, when most of her travel was cut short by the pandemic. Dr. Scaglione's expertise and research considers theoretical and applied problems is in statistical signal processing, communications theory and cyber-physical infrastructures for sustainable energy delivery systems, where her work has focused on addressing security and optimization challenges.

Abstract: IoT device security has become one of the most important and challenging topics in recent years. In this talk, I will describe an observation framework we have developed and implemented to actively and passively observe insecure IoT devices and attacks against them. Our engines have discovered a wide range of insecure and/or compromised devices from consumer-level to those deployed at infrastructures. I will also explain a series of security notifications we have made to inform the stakeholders including device operators, manufacturers, and owners via ISPs, security apps, and a web service.

Speaker’s Bio: Katsunari Yoshioka is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, Japan. Before joining Yokohama National University, he was a researcher at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan. His research interests cover a wide area of system security and network security including malware analysis and IoT security. For his works on network attack observation and security notifications, he has received various awards including the commendation for science and technology by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the Culture of Information Security Award in Japan. He received a Ph.D. in Engineering from Yokohama National University.