Security Vulnerability and Mitigation in Photovoltaic Systems

Software and firmware vulnerabilities pose security threats to photovoltaic (PV) systems. When patches are not available or cannot be timely applied to fix vulnerabilities, it is important to mitigate vulnerabilities such that they cannot be exploited by attackers or their impacts will be limited when exploited. However, the vulnerability mitigation problem for PV systems has received little attention. This paper analyzes known security vulnerabilities in PV systems, proposes a multi-level mitigation framework and various mitigation strategies including neural network-based attack detection inside inverters, and develops a prototype system as a proof-of-concept for building vulnerability mitigation into PV system design.