Digital Substation

Relay protection, SCADA, Metering, and Cybersecurity for electrical infrastructure.

Ethernet (Technology)

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MAC addresses, OUI and the digital substation: how to know who is on the technology network

In a pcap from a digital substation attention usually goes to GOOSE, SV, MMS and PTP. But useful diagnostics often live lower — in the MAC addresses. The article explains what an OUI is and how MA-L, MA-M, MA-S and CID differ, how to guess a vendor from the first octets, why a shared Source MAC on two IEDs breaks MMS and triggers MAC flapping, and what a digital-substation engineer should check on a first pass over a pcap.

Network infrastructure in digital substations

A local area network is critical infrastructure in a digital substation. Experts in the area of relay protection and automatic as well as automated process control systems run into it with increasing frequency, while the number of questions such as, ‘How to design it?’, ‘How to maintain it?’, ‘How to evaluate its security and effectiveness?’ only increases.

MAC-address — what is this?

In any packet transmitted over Ethernet there are two MAC-addresses present: one is a source MAC-address and another is a destination MAC-address. When forwarding data, Ethernet-switches use this important data. So what is a MAC-address? What are the differences between unicast, multicast and broadcast destination MAC-addresses? What destination MAC-addresses are common for IEC 61850 standard protocols? Let's have a more detailed look on this.

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