Re: [smartgrid-discuss] Draft charter for proposed OASIS Energy InteroperationTechnical Committee

[Arshad Noor <arshad.noor@strongauth.com>]

OASIS TC's are made up, unfortunately, of either business-focused
TC's or security-focused TC's.  As a result, the business TC's do
a great job of capturing business-requirements, but rarely address
security issues (despite the evidence of increasing attacks against
applications on the internet), while security TC's tend to focus
on hard-core security without addressing the business drivers to
ensure their focus and adoption.

Two TC's that have departed from this norm are the OASIS Enterprise
Key Management Infrastructure (EKMI) TC and the OASIS LegalXML
eNotarization (eNotary) TC.

The EKMI TC has not only developed a hard-core cryptographic
key-management protocol - the Symmetric Key Services Markup
Languague (SKSML), but also focuses on creating Implementation,
Operations and Audit Guidelines to ensure that implementations of
EKMI are in compliance with legal/contractual regulations for 
data-security.  This was stated as an objective within the TC's
charter at its inception two years ago.  As a result, besides
security people, the TC includes IT Auditors, application
developers and IT consultants all of whom are focused on meeting
security *and* business objectives.

The LegalXML eNotarization TC has just created a protocol called
the eNotarization Markup Language (ENML) designed to electronically
notarize electronic documents.  While ENML was designed to serve the
real-estate industry primarily, it is generic enough that it can be
used to re-engineer any business process that relies on notarized
paper documents.  This not only saves money, but speeds up the
business transaction and improves the integrity of data-capture in
applications.  ENML specifically addresses security as a core
component in the protocol because of the impact electronically
notarized documents can have in the multi-trillion dollar real-
estate industry.

There is even a document titled "Security implications of ENML"
within the TC's repository to inform legal and business people on
what they need to know about securing and trusting eNotarized
documents.

My suggestion is have the new Energy Interop TC specifically
include security features (identifying individually desired
features) as part of its deliverables to ensure the TC meets its
charter objectives.

Arshad Noor
StrongAuth, Inc.

Edward Koch wrote:
> Neil,
> 
> You are absolutely correct.  I know that you are very involved in the 
> AMI-SEC effort and my hope is that much of the requirements from that 
> will be input to the OpenADR task group within UCAIug and therefore 
> become part of the OASIS/UCAIug collaboration.  Darren Highfill has been 
> very involved with setting up the OpenADR task group within UCAIug so 
> I’m fairly confident that this topic will not be ignored.
> 
> I’ve never been involved with an OASIS TC, but it is safe to say that 
> OASIS does have a lot of experience with cyber security.  I’m just not 
> sure how they address this cross cutting issue within their other TC’s.  
> Can someone that has more direct experience with OASIS comment on this 
> topic?
> 
> -ed koch
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> *From:* ngreenfield@aep.com [mailto:ngreenfield@aep.com]
> *Sent:* Monday, February 16, 2009 2:03 PM
> *To:* William Cox
> *Cc:* Mary Ann Piette; smartgrid-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org
> *Subject:* Re: [smartgrid-discuss] Draft charter for proposed OASIS 
> Energy Interoperation Technical Committee
> 
> Well, I'm not a member, but for someone who's well immersed in my own 
> organization's Smart Grid initiative, I would say that one critical 
> component missing in this draft proposal is a discussion around cyber 
> security.
> 
> There are a number of interrelated factors that need to be considered 
> relative to cyber security and the Smart Grid, including the basic 
> attributes (primary security services) of */Confidentiality/*, 
> */Integrity/*, */Availability/*, */Accounting/Auditing/*, 
> */Identification/*, */Authentication/*, */Authorization /*and 
> */Non-repudiation/*.  Privacy is another attribute, but it relies upon 
> the others and is mainly a consideration of laws and regulations and how 
> it relates to the individual.  
> 
> There are a lot of factors involved with the implementation of the Smart 
> Grid and it relies heavily on cyber security.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Neil Greenfield