SunSpec Blockchain Specification

Future power grids leverage Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), but the current industry practices and regulation are not sufficient to ensure that such critical resources are effectively protected from cybersecurity threats. A particular problem is that the communication keys (cryptographic private keys) used in DER devices can have very different levels of security and protection, but such important information is not easily available to communication endpoints such as IEEE 2030.5 utility servers. 

 

To address this problem, SunSpec Alliance created the SunSpec Blockchain Work Group and hosted its first meeting on October 29, 2019. In the following meetings the work group discussed how a blockchain-based key registry for DER devices can provide an easily accessible repository for querying security-critical information about DER devices and their keys, while at the same time provide high availability and strong integrity protection for the stored information. The present document is the final report of this work group.