| Smart Grid networks must be extremely tolerant of error conditions. The electrical grid is critically important to modern life, and it would be unacceptable if the control of the combined information and power grid is not smart, but instead is brittle. Smart Grid networks also need to be able to adapt as they experience a variety of kinds of unexpected “stress” they encounter during untested, but normal occurrences within the network.
Resilience testing is also be established through a tool like Denial-of-Service (DoS) testing, wherein a model of the service is used to monitor the service with stateful, realistic service traffic while stateless DoS traffic is targeted at the key service components to ensure that each of them is not the weakest link in the service.
Resilience is also established through fuzzing, wherein the service under test is still monitored (as above) using a valid service exchange to ensure that despite a perfect storm of invalid or unexpected traffic, the service continues to function properly. In order to get all the benefits of the Smart Grid, the network must be practically bulletproof.
A key application of fuzz testing occurs when smart grid operators (as a special case of industrial control system operators) are selecting new vendor equipment
for use in their future network planning. The long deployment horizons, which are frequently measured in decades, dictate that the selection criteria and process must be extremely unforgiving and thorough. In such situations, it is essential that a durable, impartial baseline be established, especially around interoperability of the
protocols they intend to use within their network architectures. One of the least ambiguous ways to accomplish this is via fuzzing, either based on open
protocol specifications or on service-specific traffic flows that must
be supported by the operational network. Mu's Protocol Fuzzing and Studio Zx modules simplify the process of comparison since the results of many different target devices can be examined side-by-side to
see which is best able to stand up to invalid or unexpected inputs around
the traffic that must be supported by the network. The unique ability for Studio Zx to support fuzzing even for proprietary protocols is unmatched in the test industry.
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