Federal Regulatory Guidance

Threats to cyber security are capable of adversely impacting reliability of electrical power generation. Protection of critical infrastructures, which include the national electrical power grid and other essential utilities, are now considered a significant aspect of national security.

Compliance requirements define Critical Assets, on which reliability of the electrical power grid depends, and also defines Critical Cyber Assets (Information Processing systems) essential to the operation of the Critical Assets. Examples of Critical Cyber Assets at control centers and backup control centers include computer systems and networked facilities at master and remote sites that provide monitoring and control, automatic generation control, real-time power system modeling, and real-time inter-utility data exchange.

Critical Cyber Assets are wrapped in an electronic security perimeter, whose definition closely matches the definition of a network security domain used by the Department of Defense.

Owl one-way Cross Domain Solutions provide a method of secure access through the electronic security perimeter; enabling Critical Cyber Assets to share information with the outside world without risk of data corruption or loss of network integrity.

DualDiode® Technology from Owl computing provides a non-routable protocol break that is rendered in hardware and operates at the physical layer.