Cybersecurity for Smart Inverters: Guidelines for Residential and Light Commercial Solar Energy Systems

This report provides practical cybersecurity guidance for small-scale solar inverter implementations that are typically used in homes and small businesses. These guidelines are informed by a review of known smart-inverter vulnerabilities documented in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), a review of information about known smart-inverter cyber-attacks, and testing of five example smart inverters. The report also provides recommendations to smart-inverter manufacturers on the cybersecurity capabilities needed in their products to implement the seven guidelines. These recommendations build on the Internet of Things (IoT) cybersecurity capability baselines defined in NIST IR 8259A and IR 8259B by providing smart-inverter-specific information for some of the baseline cybersecurity capabilities.