2015 October

21-Oct-2015 Xylem and the solution to PDaS using WITS

Water companies around the country have a major task ahead in order to be compliant with the Private Drains and Sewers (PDaS) requirements, which come into effect in October 2016. With thousands of properties falling under the new remit, finding suitable telemetry devices, compliant with the Water Industry Telemetry Standard (WITS) is now an increasing priority.

From October 2016 OFWAT has ruled that water companies will become responsible for most private sewers, lateral drains and pumping […]

By Ed Oborn|2020-11-24T07:46:05+00:00October 21st, 2015|News, PSA News|0 Comments

21-Oct-2015 WITS-DNP3 Protocol – A further update on its development and adoption

About the author

Charles Williams – Strategic Business Director, Grontmij
MIET CEng BSc Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Charles has over 25 years experience in telemetry, SCADA, instrumentation, control and automation in the water, transportation and nuclear industries. He has supported the WITS initiative since its inception and is currently the Chairman of the WITS DNP 3 Protocol Standards Association committee.

The need for a standard protocol

All UK water companies use telemetry and SCADA to monitor and control their remote […]

By Ed Oborn|2020-11-24T07:46:41+00:00October 21st, 2015|News, PSA News|0 Comments

15-Oct-2015 Secure Authentication and WITS-DNP3 – Synopsis

Security recommendation

There have been a number of comments appearing in the “press” recently about DNP3 security:

The DNP User Group have deprecated Secure Authentication Version 2 (SAv2) and are now specifying version 5 (SAv5). This has partly been done so that the DNP3 protocol can be adopted as a standard in the Smart Grid catalogue.
The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel laid down a set of requirements which meant that the DNP security model needed to […]

By Ed Oborn|2020-11-24T07:46:45+00:00October 15th, 2015|PSA News|0 Comments

15-Oct-2015 Secure Authentication and WITS-DNP3 – The details

Security Considerations

The WITS-DNP3 protocol relies on the security provided by the standard DNP3 protocol. DNP3 has never looked at the physical layer of the communications network and so when implementing DNP3 systems the user must be aware of the need to secure the communications network. The SCADA system is only vulnerable if the attacker has access to the system:

Using ADSL where some part of the communications system spans the public domain internet. In this […]

By Ed Oborn|2020-11-24T07:46:48+00:00October 15th, 2015|Uncategorized|0 Comments