How ‘power fingerprint’ could improve security for ICS/SCADA systems

Most people have heard that one way law enforcement can figure out who might be growing marijuana in their basement is to monitor power consumption.

If a small house is sucking up as much electricity as two or three similar houses in the neighborhood, then something “anomalous” is going on.

That – at a vastly more microscopic level – is what some security experts say can be done to detect malicious activity in digital systems, ranging from the power plants that form the nation’s critical infrastructure, all the way down to tiny embedded devices in the Internet of Things (IoT).

The idea is that since every device has a “power fingerprint,” that by detecting anomalies in that baseline fingerprint, it is possible to tell if something bad is happening, or an intrusion has occurred.

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