IBM develops wind and solar forecasting system

IBM has developed power and weather modelling software that could help utilities increase the reliability of renewable energy resources.

IBM says the technology combines weather prediction and analytics to forecast the availability of wind power and solar energy.

The American firm claims this will allow utilities to integrate more renewable energy into the power grid, helping to reduce carbon emissions while improving clean energy output for consumers and businesses.

The solution, named Hybrid Renewable Energy Forecasting (HyRef), uses weather modelling capabilities, advanced cloud imaging technology and sky-facing cameras to track cloud movements, while sensors on the turbines monitor wind speed, temperature and direction.

When combined with analytics technology, the data-assimilation based solution can produce local weather forecasts within a wind farm as far as one month in advance, or in 15-minute increments.

By utilising local weather forecasts, IBM claims HyRef can predict the performance of each individual wind turbine and estimate the amount of generated renewable energy.

According to IBM, this level of insight can help utilities to better manage the variable nature of wind and solar, and more accurately forecast the amount of power that can be redirected into the power grid or stored. It could also allow energy organisations to integrate other conventional sources such as coal and natural gas.

"Utilities around the world are employing a host of strategies to integrate new renewable energy resources into their operating systems in order to reach a baseline goal of a 25 percent renewable energy mix globally by 2025," said vice admiral Dennis McGinn, CEO of the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE). "The weather modelling and forecasting data generated from HyRef will significantly improve this process and in turn, put us one step closer to maximising the full potential of renewable resources."

State Grid Jibei Electricity Power Company Limited (SG-JBEPC), a subsidiary company of the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), is using HyRef to integrate renewable energy into the grid. This initiative led by SG-JBEPC is phase one of the Zhangbei 670MW demonstration project, the world's largest renewable energy initiative that combines wind and solar power, energy storage and transmission. This project contributes to China's five-year plan to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

By using the IBM wind forecasting technology, phase one of the Zhangbei project aims to increase the integration of renewable power generation by 10 percent. This amount of additional energy can power roughly more than 14,000 homes.

Brad Gammons, general manager of IBM's global energy and utilities industry, said applying analytics and harnessing big data will allow utilities to tackle the intermittent nature of renewable energy and forecast power production from solar and wind, in a way that has never been done before.

Case study: Toyota fleet management system gathers global fork-lift truck data remotely

Toyota Material Handling Europe has developed an operational fleet management system that monitors and controls fork-lift trucks globally. The system, which the company uses at its manufacturing plants in Sweden, France and Italy, and offers as service to its customers, is built using Microsoft technology.

It won two awards in the Computer Weekly European User Awards for Enterprise Software – one as the best private sector entry, the other for best of show.

CIO Håkan Borglund (pictured) describes the Toyota I_Site service as “a fleet management system, which is very interesting especially if you have a big fleet of fork-lift trucks”.

He says its business intelligence functionality is built into the application, into the business logic: “You can have triggers for various things. For example, if a truck touches something and that suggests goods are damaged, you can see details about the event: when it happened, who was driving. It can indicate what training is needed for the driver. It is really alive. It is not something you download once a month.”

At the heart of the system is a black box on a fork-lift truck. Toyota I_Site collects data from the fork-lift truck, transmits the data to a central database using wireless technology and the regular mobile networks, without the need to install software or hardware. The data can then be analysed over a web interface.

“Originally, we wanted to predict when service was needed for the trucks – that then enabled other functions, such as safety,” says Borglund. “It is a global system, and can be deployed anywhere using a mobile network, including in our own factories.”

Toyota Material Handling Europe's fleet management system is designed to address the problems material handling companies experience in optimising their truck fleets, improving the logistics process and reducing overall energy consumption.

The division makes Toyota fork-lift trucks and BT warehouse equipment – industrial equipment for material handling. Toyota acquired BT in 2000. As well as the three European factories, it has sales and marketing companies in 30 countries.

Borglund, who is based in Sweden, runs an IT department of 200, consisting of two teams – information systems and IT infrastructure.

The information systems team has a business relationship management structure, with a business systems manager for each process. “We have close co-operation with the business,” says Borglund. “I am glad that we have that. It works well as a set-up.”

The I_Site system, built on Microsoft’s .Net framework, is now in its third version. Borglund confirms it is being used in the company’s own factories and that there are some 10,000 black boxes beaming back data from fork-lift trucks worldwide.

"We have a fair mix of standard and custom-built systems," he says. "M3 is our ERP [enterprise resource planning], which is standard. But we are not afraid to build things ourselves.”

Borglund, who came to Toyota from the airline industry, says the KPI-driven service culture of that industry has informed his work at the Japan-based automotive company, which is well known for its culture of continuous improvement – the "Toyota Way".

Hacker Holes in Server Management System Allow 'Almost-Physical' Access

Major vulnerabilities in a protocol for remotely monitoring and managing servers would allow attackers to hijack the computers to gain control of them, access or erase data, or lock others out. The vulnerabilities exist in more than 100,000 servers connected to the internet, according to two researchers.

The vulnerabilities reside in the Intelligent Platform Management Interface, a protocol used by Baseboard Management Controllers that are used to remotely monitor servers for heat and electricity issues as well as manage access to them and other functions.

The security holes would allow hackers to obtain password hashes from the servers or bypass authentication entirely to copy content, install a backdoor or even wipe the servers clean, according to Dan Farmer, an independent computer security consultant who conducted the research for the Defense Department’s DARPA.

A scan of the internet conducted by HD Moore, chief research officer at Rapid7 and creator of the Metasploit Framework penetration testing tool, found more than 100,000 systems online that were vulnerable to one or more of the security issues.

The IPMI protocol standardizes communication so that management controllers from various manufacturers can interact seamlessly with servers from various manufacturers. BCMs provide a virtual keyboard, mouse and removable media to remotely manage servers and are installed on nearly all servers manufactured today.

By using the vulnerabilities in IPMI to compromise a server’s remote management controller, an attacker can then gain access to the server itself.

“In short – any weakness of the BMC can be used to get an almost-physical level of access to the server,” Moore says, noting that users of IPMI are “heavily cautioned by the vendors to never place a server’s BMC on the internet because of the dangers it poses,” but many ignore the warning.

“Essentially every modern company and government on the planet relies on IPMI for system management, and internal attacks would be substantially more deadly,” he says.

Two versions of the protocol currently in use, versions 1.5 and 2.0, both have issues. Version 1.5 doesn’t require that passwords for the BMC be encrypted. And version 2.0 has half a dozen additional vulnerabilities.

Farmer identified six distinct vulnerabilities in version 2.0 of the protocol. One intrinsic vulnerability lies in the fact that the protocol specifications call for passwords for the IPMI to be stored unencrypted on the BMC. He says this is particularly foolish because organizations often configure a single IPMI to manage large groups of servers — sometimes as many as 100,000 in the case of hosting providers — all of which would be vulnerable if someone gained access to the clear text password.

“The exposure of clear text credentials makes it possible for an attacker to compromise all BMCs using the same password,” he says. “Information [about] how and where these passwords are stored has been documented online, and has been confirmed on both Dell and Supermicro BMC implementations.”

Another vulnerability allows anyone to obtain a cryptographic password hash of a user’s account, allowing an attacker to perform an offline brute-force attack to decipher the password. A Metasploit module already exists to conduct such an attack.

“A Python script and a Metasploit Framework module exist to test for this issue and have broken over 10 percent of the passwords with an initial test,” Moore says.

A third vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass the authentication process entirely if someone has Cipher 0 enabled in the BMC configuration. Cipher 0 is often enabled by default in BMC systems to handle the authentication handshake, but it allows anyone to bypass authentication and send the system commands.

A fourth vulnerability would allow someone to use anonymous logins with the username and password set to a null value to gain administrative privileges on the control system.

Some BMCs also enable Universal Plug and Play by default. Moore published a paper earlier this year identifying three sets of serious security flaws in UPnP.

After performing an internet-wide scan to determine how many BMC systems are connected to the internet, he found more than 300,000. Of these, 195,000 were using version 1.5 of the protocol, which does not provide any encryption. Another 113,000 of the BMCs support version 2.0, and of these, 99,000 exposed password hashes, and 53,0000 were vulnerable to the password bypass issue due to Cipher 0 being enabled. About 35,000 BMCs from Supermico have a Universal Plug and Play vulnerability.

“The 53,000 BMCs that allow authentication via Cipher 0 are at immediate risk of compromise,” Moore says. “No exploit code is needed to manipulate these systems as the standard IPMI command-line tools provide the required functionality. An attacker could use the Cipher 0 weakness to configure a backdoor account with administrative privileges. This backdoor could be used to compromise the BMC and the connected server.”

Because BMCs have their own IP address, separate from the server’s IP address, hackers could hijack the BMC and never be noticed by network administrators who are only monitoring server IP addresses for nefarious activity, Moore says.

Farmer began researching the IPMI protocol in mid-2012 as part of a DARPA Cyber Fast Track grant. Earlier this year Farmer published a list of security best practices for IPMI (.pdf).

Moore says companies should make sure that IPMI-enabled BMCs are not connected to the public internet, and that companies should also disable Cipher 0, set complex passwords, and in the case of Supermicro systems, demand a patch for the UPnP vulnerability from their vendor.

“Many folks are unaware that their systems have IPMI enabled in the first place, the only way to tell for sure is to use some form of scanner on the local network,” says Moore, who added an IPMI module to the open source Metasploit Framework to help with this.

N.S.A. Leak Puts Focus on System Administrators

As the N.S.A., some companies and the city of San Francisco have learned, information technology administrators, who are vital to keeping the system running and often have access to everything, are in the perfect position if they want to leak sensitive information or blackmail higher-level officials.

 

“The difficulty comes in an environment where computer networks need to work all the time,” said Christopher P. Simkins, a former Justice Department lawyer whose firm advises companies, including military contractors, on insider threats.

 

The director of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, acknowledged the problem in a television interview on Sunday and said his agency would institute “a two-man rule” that would limit the ability of each of its 1,000 system administrators to gain unfettered access to the entire system. The rule, which would require a second check on each attempt to access sensitive information, is already in place in some intelligence agencies. It is a concept borrowed from the field of cryptography, where, in effect, two sets of keys are required to unlock a safe.

 

From government agencies to corporate America, there is a renewed emphasis on thwarting the rogue I.T. employee. Such in-house breaches are relatively rare, but the N.S.A. leaks have prompted assessments of the best precautions businesses and government can take, from added checks and balances to increased scrutiny during hiring.

 

“The scariest threat is the systems administrator,” said Eric Chiu, president of Hytrust, a computer security company. “The system administrator has godlike access to systems they manage.”

 

Asked Sunday about General Alexander’s two-man rule, Dale W. Meyerrose, a former chief information officer for the director of national intelligence, said, “I think what he’s doing is reasonable.”

 

“There are all kinds of things in life that have two-man rules,” added Mr. Meyerrose, who now runs a business consulting firm. “We’ve had a two-man rule ever since we had nuclear weapons. And when somebody repairs an airplane, an engineer has to check it.”

 

John R. Schindler, a former N.S.A. counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Naval War College, agreed that the “buddy system” would help. “But I just don’t see it as a particularly good long-term solution,” he said.

 

“Wouldn’t it be easier to scrub all your I.T.’s for security issues,” he asked, “and see if there is another Snowden?”

 

The two-man rule “has existed in other areas of the intelligence community for certain exceptionally sensitive programs where high risk was involved,” he said, “but it’s not a standard procedure.”

 

Mr. Meyerrose and Mr. Schindler both said that software monitoring systems can also help, though they can be evaded by a knowledgeable systems administrator. The biggest issue for government and industry, they said, is to vet the I.T. candidates more carefully and to watch for any signs of disillusionment after they are hired.

 

“It’s really a personal reliability issue,” Mr. Meyerrose said.

 

Insiders of all types going rogue have become a problem for the government and industry over the last decade. One of the most prominent is Pfc. Bradley Manning, who downloaded a vast archive of American military and diplomatic materials from his post in Iraq and gave it to WikiLeaks. But there have been others, including scientists and software developers who stole secrets from American companies where they worked and provided them to China.

 

Now the spotlight is on the system administrators, who are often the technology workers with the most intimate knowledge of what is moving through their employers’ computer networks.