Re-engineering Grep and Diff for NERC CIP

The present and future smart grid has a large number of devices that produce an avalanche of data. Our research explores whether we can channel this avalanche to drive more efficient NERC CIP audits. The power industry has both high-level, natural-language NERC CIP policies and low-level data sources such as router configuration files, Windows registries, and PMU data. Utilities must use low-level data to demonstrate compliance at a high level and each utility does this in their own way. In this paper, we propose our two tools, Context-Free Grep and Hierarchical Diff, to help utilities and auditors generate reliable and reproducible evidence to support or refute NERC CIP compliance. Our tools are currently in the design phase, although we have prototyped Hierarchical Diff.