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At the heart of both the value and the vulnerability of power substation communication is the ability to remotely access protection, control, automation, and SCADA equipment. These communications are becoming increasingly important to the engineering and operations staff of utilities, yet they may leave systems vulnerable to electronic intrusion. Electronic intruders randomly or maliciously operating circuit breakers, reclosers, and switchgear, or changing current transformer ratios, would have disastrous consequences on the safety, reliability, and performance of our electric power systems.

In light of these vulnerabilities, the need for effective procedures and techniques to reduce the chances of electronic intrusion is increasingly evident. Wide Area Network (WAN) communications has received a lot of general attention lately. This paper, however, goes beyond general, and is a tutorial on how to deploy several very effective communication security methods within the substation Local Area Network (LAN). These methods include secure control of substation devices, and of information access to these devices, using any remote connection method such as traditional in-service telephone modems and radios, digital modems, and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Robust lockout of unwanted connections including third party “back door” access and passwords is also performed. These features are already available in substation devices to manage connections and response to messages. They detect and lock out illegitimate access by monitoring, locally and remotely, the status of connections and configuration. Finally, they thwart malicious activity by using settings changes to reconfigure the substation in response to a communications breach.

We discuss practical examples for several proven methods.
* Secure password methods
* Secure modem callback
* IED and communications processor security settings
* Secure WAN access device control to communicate in a very secure manner across great
distances and through insecure, untrusted network infrastructures
* Secure engineering access and SCADA via physical and logical connection permissives
* Secure commands via jurisdictional and operational control permissives
* Monitoring security parameters
* Automatic reaction to security breach

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