As Jefferis worked, the monitors gave the visitors a firsthand view of an intrusion into systems just like theirs. In one corner, a CCTV feed displayed a model transmission line, the final target of the infiltration. Jefferis says his goal was to present “both sides of an attack—the very start where someone clicks a seemingly harmless link, and then the results, which could be a system going catastrophically wrong.”Over the next half hour, Jefferis deftly penetrated the system using the same tools and methods freely available to the hacking community. One such tool, a brute-force password checker, appeared on one of the screens.As a cascade of passwords scrolled down the screen, an audience member saw their own password flash by.“It was quite an enlightening moment—seeing their face,” Jefferis says. “They were thinking, ‘oh, this could have been me.’”All in all, it took Jefferis less than 30 minutes to infiltrate the power system. With a final keystroke, the transmission line on the CCTV feed went dark.But this attack simulation is only a small part of what the Smart Grid Laboratory provides. As Jefferis explains, the lab offers the electric utilities industry much more: “Using the range, we can show how it would have been stopped.”
How the Partnership Began
The story behind the lab began years earlier, over a cup of coffee.Sagar Dayabhai, a principal engineer with Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), was participating in an IEC security committee developing standards for Ethernet-based communications in electrical substations. At this committee meeting, Dayabhai was approached by a representative from Thales. The pair realized they lived in the same city and decided to meet.
“Together we provided a state-of-the-art Smart Grid Laboratory for UK energy utilities.”
Over coffee, Dayabhai learned that Thales had an interest in equipping the NDEC to support the electric utilities sector. The center already supported sectors such as aviation, automotive, water, and industrial systems, but energy was an important gap to fill.“Critical national infrastructure, especially smart grids, is being increasingly targeted by sophisticated, advanced persistent threats and attacks,” Dayabhai says, citing attacks ranging from the coordinated breach of Denmark’s energy sector to the sabotage of a Norwegian dam. “We needed a facility where utilities could test out different security controls, implement them, and test them in a safe manner.”A cybersecurity lab dedicated to energy infrastructure would be the first of its kind in the UK. Thales and SEL quickly agreed to move forward.Morgan Hopkins, a sales manager with Thales, recalls the decision to partner with SEL: “The pedigree that SEL [has] in power equipment and supporting national electric grids, and the pedigree that Thales has in supporting critical national infrastructure made the collaboration a perfect fit.”From that point, the partnership moved quickly. Thales built the physical system, including the panels, wiring, simulator, and integration into the NDEC facility. SEL delivered the devices and overall design, ensuring the system represented a full transmission substation.
Thales and SEL use the Smart Grid Laboratory to train and collaborate with customers across the UK critical national infrastructure sector.
Why the Industry Needs the Lab
If you ask Connor Richards what his team does at the Smart Grid Laboratory, he states it plainly: “We specialize in building and breaking systems.”As an operational technology (OT) consultant with Thales, Richards helps visitors navigate the challenges and understand the criticality of OT security. He notes an OT system in use today “could be from the 60s, so although it works, it’s not necessarily designed with security in mind.” Richards acknowledges that finding solutions to mitigate OT vulnerabilities is a high-stakes challenge.
“A hard drive or computer shutting down might be annoying, but a furnace heating up too high—that can cause some real-world consequences.”
But the age of many OT environments leads some operators to view security upgrades as, themselves, a risk to operational resilience, fearing that major upgrades may introduce unexpected behaviors.To allay these concerns and demonstrate how legacy system owners can deploy modern security solutions, the Smart Grid Laboratory provides hands-on access to real-world systems in a controlled environment. “This allows companies to come to us and do the testing, training, exercising on equipment that’s not in the field, but is the same equipment,” Richards says.As a partner with deep experience in engineering and securing OT systems, SEL helped Thales achieve a level of realism that is critical when testing cybersecurity scenarios.
The Smart Grid Laboratory includes a full IEC 61850-based digital secondary system along with the cyber range, which includes facilities to demonstrate vulnerabilities in industrial control systems, transportation, and robotics.
A National Center of Competence
With SEL providing equipment and technical design, the lab allows visitors to train, test, and evaluate security measures on a fully fledged IEC 61850 transmission substation.SEL designed the lab to represent the gold-standard of substation engineering, leveraging core SEL technologies: SEL-400 series relays, the SEL Blueframe OT software platform, OT software-defined networking (SDN), and other components that support IEC 61850-based protection and automation.Meanwhile, the contributions from Thales are as varied as their security and defense expertise: identity and authentication capabilities, digital trust systems, public key infrastructure, and the operational knowledge that supports security operations and analytics. “The industry is now better off,” Dayabhai explains, “because it provides critical national infrastructure operators like energy utilities with a realistic environment to test digital substations and different attack scenarios in those digital substations.”To Dayabhai, the Smart Grid Laboratory is also a perfect tool to educate stakeholders on each side of the IT/OT divide on how to build resilience into complex, interconnected systems.Looking ahead, Dayabhai sees the lab playing an even larger role as threats grow more sophisticated and systems become more complex. “The lab will grow into a center of excellence for secure, resilient, zero-trust enabled infrastructure,” he says.
Blocking the Attack
During the attack simulation, Jefferis showed how an attacker could infiltrate a transmission substation in less than 30 minutes using commonplace tools and tactics. But the Smart Grid Laboratory offers more than attack simulations. Fundamentally, it is a tool to help prevent disruptions before they can occur.“Using the range,” says Jefferis, “We can introduce OT SDN, and we can show it would stop the attack in its tracks.”Jefferis explains that OT SDN enables engineers to precisely design what can and cannot occur on a network. “The granularity that you have with it—being able to define connectivity through not just a firewall, but to the level of specific protocols—allows you to be at the forefront of protection.” To prove his point, Jefferis prepared a second attack. The cyber range software reset the network to its original state before the infiltration, but this time, Jefferis switched from traditional networking to preconfigured SDN communications pathways designed by Thales and SEL.As the visitors watched, he launched the attack again.This time, OT SDN blocked it. A series of 502 responses filled one monitor as OT SDN rejected the command that had previously disabled the lab transmission system.
For visitors to the Smart Grid Laboratory, demonstrations like this turn cybersecurity from an abstract concern into something tangible. By visiting the lab, utilities gain access to a complete IEC 61850 substation along with the guidance needed to better understand their own vulnerabilities, identify practical mitigation steps, and validate solutions before deploying them in the field.“When they leave,” Dayabhai says, “they leave with confidence, clarity, and a clear roadmap.”