Saadat Malik

This talk presents to the audience Cisco's Smart Grid End to End Communications Architecture. Building a smart grid is a complex process that can span many years. Key to ensuring a successful deployment revolves around putting in place a business objectives driven process that drives technology decisions with a view into present and future needs. Business objectives must be mapped to crisp and well defined use cases cutting across all domains of a utility. Communications requirements, such as… Show more

This talk presents to the audience Cisco's Smart Grid End to End Communications Architecture. Building a smart grid is a complex process that can span many years. Key to ensuring a successful deployment revolves around putting in place a business objectives driven process that drives technology decisions with a view into present and future needs. Business objectives must be mapped to crisp and well defined use cases cutting across all domains of a utility. Communications requirements, such as those around security, bandwidth and quality of services, derived from an analysis of these use cases, then leads to a roadmap of technology architectural decisions. Good technology decisions here result in an intelligent, fully integrated and participative communications infrastructure, pivotal to the roll out of a smarter grid. The purpose of this talk is to start a rich, interactive, architectural dialogue that leads to a close partnership between the utility and Cisco, resulting in the development of a business goals driven communications architecture enabling the utility’s smart grid transformation. Show less

Ensuring that the electric grid infrastructure of the future is resilient in the face of attacks, existing and unknown, is essential to achieving the objectives of a “smart grid”. Interoperability of this environment is critical, yet creates a more diverse threat environment and creates further complexity with which a security framework must deal with. Perhaps, the best way to reduce risk and secure the grid is by ensuring that security is built into the communications fabric that pulls the… Show more

Ensuring that the electric grid infrastructure of the future is resilient in the face of attacks, existing and unknown, is essential to achieving the objectives of a “smart grid”. Interoperability of this environment is critical, yet creates a more diverse threat environment and creates further complexity with which a security framework must deal with. Perhaps, the best way to reduce risk and secure the grid is by ensuring that security is built into the communications fabric that pulls the various components of the grid together into a synergistic, more intelligent grid. This talk presents a security analysis of the various functional domains of the utility grid, discusses the environmental dynamics created by the integrated and interoperable functioning of these domains, and proposes a communications fabric based, end to end framework for securing this environment. The talk concludes by discussing at a high level the communications architecture that would need to be developed keeping in mind this security framework to ensure that security embedded within it is gets applied effectively to all aspects of the utility environment. Show less

This was the first public talk on Cisco's end to end communications architecture. It summarized the work that was produced by the cross functional group I had led at Cisco the past year.

Delivered at the Google campus to a mixed audience comprised of US Chinese entrepreneur community, Silicon Valley venture capital firms and a fair sprinkling of interested Google employees. Ed Lu, former Astronaut, was one of the fellow members on the panel that took place after the talk!

The electricity distribution landscape is facing some radical changes. It will become the melting pot of demand as well as supply sources of tomorrow. These sources will behave differently that the more centralized or static sources of today behave. Renewables integration for example is taking a centralized supply system and inserting a distributed element into it in a big way. PHEVs are changing the way utilities must look at its consumers. From fixed predictable entities to mobile entities… Show more

The electricity distribution landscape is facing some radical changes. It will become the melting pot of demand as well as supply sources of tomorrow. These sources will behave differently that the more centralized or static sources of today behave. Renewables integration for example is taking a centralized supply system and inserting a distributed element into it in a big way. PHEVs are changing the way utilities must look at its consumers. From fixed predictable entities to mobile entities with changing demand patterns. The backend would change too. Today where the DMS systems interface with just a few other systems, these will interface with a lot more applications in the backend, changing the way information structures must be created to support them. All this will fundamentally challenge not only the way we construct our power system but will require us to think carefully about how we build the information system which will integrate with this power system. But here is the good news. The good news is that these challenges are not entirely new for the IT and communications community. We have seen computing go from centralized to a distributed model, from fixed user locations to anywhere, anytime connectivity. There is a wealth of experience and know how that exists in the IT community to help the power system community make the jump. The key is to ensure that we build the right framework and drive it through effective policies to ensure that the right paradigms are mapped to this new environment and the right results are achieved. Cyber physical convergence is a complicating factor in all this. But with careful design and planning, we can meld the best practices the IT and communications industry has developed over many years with the power industry changing ways and bring smart grid in its most optimal, resilient and secure form to its consumers. Show less

This was the first public white paper from Cisco outlining its vision and strategy for Smart Grid. Smart grid is the term generally used to describe the integration of the elements connected to the electrical grid with an information infrastructure to offer numerous benefits for both the providers and consumers of electricity. It is an intelligent future electricity system that connects all supply, grid, and demand elements through an intelligent communication system. The backbone of a… Show more

This was the first public white paper from Cisco outlining its vision and strategy for Smart Grid. Smart grid is the term generally used to describe the integration of the elements connected to the electrical grid with an information infrastructure to offer numerous benefits for both the providers and consumers of electricity. It is an intelligent future electricity system that connects all supply, grid, and demand elements through an intelligent communication system. The backbone of a successful smart grid operation is a reliable, resilient, secure, and manageable standards-based open communication infrastructure that provides for intelligent linkages between the elements of the grid while participating in the decision making that delivers value to the utility and supply and demand entities connected to it. Show less

IP telephony has been adopted to replace the traditional circuit switch networks in various environments. Government Emergency Telephony Service (GETS) is one of the critical services currently provided in the traditional circuit switch network. GETS supports personnel from different organizations performing their critical missions including incidence response and prevention, national security, and emergency preparedness. Because of the convergent infrastructure for both voice and data, how to… Show more

IP telephony has been adopted to replace the traditional circuit switch networks in various environments. Government Emergency Telephony Service (GETS) is one of the critical services currently provided in the traditional circuit switch network. GETS supports personnel from different organizations performing their critical missions including incidence response and prevention, national security, and emergency preparedness. Because of the convergent infrastructure for both voice and data, how to provide GETS over IP is one of the challenges for IP telephony to prove its flexibility and strength for large-scale critical services. In this study, we explore many aspects for providing IP-based GETS, such as availability, security, interoperability, and reliability. Based on IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture, the requirements along with some analyses and recommendations are outlined to meet the strict demands for GETS in different convergent paradigms. Show less

IP telephony has been rapidly introduced to replace the traditional circuit switched infrastructure for telephony services. This change has had an enormous impact on critical-infrastructure (CI) sectors, which are expected to become increasingly dependent on IP telephony services. Reliable and secure telephony service is a key concern confronting most organizations in the critical-infrastructure sector today. With the proliferation of voice over IP (VoIP) services in these organizations, it is… Show more

IP telephony has been rapidly introduced to replace the traditional circuit switched infrastructure for telephony services. This change has had an enormous impact on critical-infrastructure (CI) sectors, which are expected to become increasingly dependent on IP telephony services. Reliable and secure telephony service is a key concern confronting most organizations in the critical-infrastructure sector today. With the proliferation of voice over IP (VoIP) services in these organizations, it is important for them to understand the security vulnerabilities and come up with a set of best practices during the evolution of the IP telephony services. This article outlines the potential security issues faced by CI sectors as they transform their traditional phone systems into VoIP systems. Vulnerability analyses are conducted to understand the impact of VoIP security challenges in the new convergent network paradigm. The most common security measures are analyzed to identify their strengths and limitations in combating these new security challenges. A set of recommendations and best practices are offered to address the key issues of VoIP security as IP telephony is being introduced into critical infrastructure. Show less

Chairperson, IT SCC’s IT Sector Specific Plan (SSP) Research and Development (R&D) Working Group that produced the R&D chapter (chapter 5) of the Sector Specific Plan for the IT SCC. This plan is the IT sector’s input to the US National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) on behalf of the IT SCC and IT GCC (government coordinating council).

Voice over IP (VoIP) is being adopted to replace the traditional circuit switched infrastructure for telephony services. This trend has an enormous impact on the critical infrastructure sectors which will progressively become more dependent in part or as a whole on VoIP services. Phone communications and its security is a relevant concern for most critical infrastructure sector organizations today. With passage of time this concern will morph into a new set of challenges and opportunities… Show more

Voice over IP (VoIP) is being adopted to replace the traditional circuit switched infrastructure for telephony services. This trend has an enormous impact on the critical infrastructure sectors which will progressively become more dependent in part or as a whole on VoIP services. Phone communications and its security is a relevant concern for most critical infrastructure sector organizations today. With passage of time this concern will morph into a new set of challenges and opportunities brought forward by the deployment of VoIP in these organizations. This study attempts to outline the potential security issues faced by the critical infrastructure sectors as they transform their traditional phone systems into VoIP systems. Security analysis is provided to understand the impact of VoIP security challenges in the new convergent network paradigm. Some recommendations are made on how to address many issues of VoIP security along the process of adopting IP telephony into critical infrastructure. Show less

As organizations increase their dependence on networks for core business processes and increase access to remote sites and mobile workers via virtual private networks (VPNs), network security becomes more and more critical. In today's networked era, information is an organization's most valuable resource. Lack of customer, partner, and employee access to e-commerce and data servers can impact both revenue and productivity. Even so, most networks do not have the proper degree of security… Show more

As organizations increase their dependence on networks for core business processes and increase access to remote sites and mobile workers via virtual private networks (VPNs), network security becomes more and more critical. In today's networked era, information is an organization's most valuable resource. Lack of customer, partner, and employee access to e-commerce and data servers can impact both revenue and productivity. Even so, most networks do not have the proper degree of security. Network Security Principles and Practices provides an in-depth understanding of the policies, products, and expertise that brings organization to this extremely complex topic and boosts your confidence in the performance and integrity of your network systems and services. Written by the CCIE engineer who wrote the CCIE Security lab exam and who helped develop the CCIE Security written exam, Network Security Principles and Practices is the first book to help prepare candidates for the CCIE Security exams and is a valuable resource on security principles and practices for all other IT professionals. Show less