I challenge S4x14 speakers to have so much technical meat that they leave 1/3 of the audience behind, Seth Bromberger of NCI Security took me up on this in a math heavy talk on incident response in a smart grid network. However he explains the graph theory with easy examples from typical smart grid deployments so loyal readers will understand the concepts even if they don’t want to do the math.
Many of you probably remember the IOActive videos showing a worm propagating through a smart grid network. Seth’s session looks at how to stop the worm from propagating through a variety of graph theory strategies such as Degree Distribution Cull, Betweenness Cull (the most promising strategy) and Shortest Paths. I found the Interdiction Problem to be interesting and something to consider for SCADA systems.
On a related note … the random mixing assumption in the epidemiological models doesn’t hold for the smart grid.