A Department of Energy (DOE) research lab is using blockchain to make the power grid more resilient to cybersecurity attacks.

Last month, the US Government Accountability Office (GOA) outlined some of the risks to the power grid from cyberattacks. He previously found that the Department of Energy focuses more on securing the grid’s generation and transmission systems. But the GOA wants to see more work on the distribution side.

That’s a key area being explored by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, particularly for two-way communications with edge devices like solar panels.

One of the ways a hacker could cause an outage is by targeting devices by altering device settings. A hash or fingerprint of the device configuration can be stored on the blockchain and constantly monitored to see if it changes. When they are updated, it is possible to verify if the change was authorized or not.

In addition to storing hashes of settings, blockchains are decentralized. That means there are multiple copies of the hash. So if one or two blockchain nodes have inconsistent data, that could trigger an alert.

In addition to device configuration changes, the ORNL project also seeks data tampering and spoofing.

“Our system helps determine in near real time whether a failure was triggered by a cyber attack or induced by natural events,” ORNL research team leader Borges Hink said. “This is the first blockchain implementation that allows this type of data validation between a substation, a control center and the metering infrastructure.”

However, it is not the first time that blockchain has been used for cybersecurity and the energy grid. Xage has a blockchain solution for cybersecurity and has partnered on projects with the Department of Energy and Comed.

No less than five energy labs have been involved in BLOSEM, which stands for Blockchain for Optimized Security and Energy Management. The project included private sector partners such as IBM, Hitachi and Energy Web and ran until April of this year.