The New York Times is reporting today that two Chinese academics wrote a paper on a major vulnerability of the U.S. power grid. Some people did not like that much:
Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because â??Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.â?
I would raise two major points of caution. The first is my normal point on Chinese academics, specifically that they really are not powerful in China. Moreover, many academics from around the world like to write papers on topics dealing with the U.S. because it is easy to get information. Pretty much everything about the U.S. that you could want to know as a scholar is online, documented, and cross-referenced, so it is easy to study. This make U.S. systems a natural workshop for scholars interested in almost anything, and offers the side benefit that pretty much every smart person in the world will look at what is happening in the U.S. and give some feedback.
Secondly, however, while it is disconcerting that the Chinese are aware of a hacking vulnerability, cascade failure of a power grid could happen naturally. Moreover, if they were really planning on attacking us that way, they probably would not publish it. It sure would have been nice if in 1939 a professor and grad student at the University of Tokyo had written a paper on the vulnerabilities of the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, including how to fix the problem, but they did not.
