Today, NIST's National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has released the initial public draft of NIST Interagency Report (NIST IR) 8498, Cybersecurity for Smart Inverters: Guidelines for Residential and Light Commercial Solar Energy Systems, for public comment.
The use of small-scale solar energy systems to generate electricity continues to increase. Smart inverters provide two critical functions to a small-scale solar energy system: they convert the direct current (DC) produced by solar panels to the alternating current (AC) used in homes and businesses, and they manage the flow of excess energy to the local electric grid.
This report provides practical cybersecurity guidelines for small-scale solar inverter implementations typically used in homes and small businesses. The report also presents recommendations to smart inverter manufacturers to improve the cybersecurity capabilities in their products.
These recommendations build on the IoT cybersecurity capability baselines defined in NIST IR 8259A and NIST IR 8259B by providing smart-inverter specific information for all baseline cybersecurity capabilities.
The public comment period is open through June 10, 2024. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.
NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page ii of this draft. For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy – Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.
