In September, JPEmbedded participated in the IEC 61850 Interoperability Event (IOP) organized by UCAIug in Charlotte. This was a great opportunity to meet several other IEC 61850 vendors and verify if our products can communicate with each other. Being a provider of communication solutions for IED (and virtually any industry domain) the most fundamental feature is to be able to ‘talk’ to other devices in the network. Without this, any other qualities of the product really do- not matter.
At IOP each participant could choose from 20+ other companies and 40+ different equipment or software tools and verify selected functionality in a very friendly atmosphere, where it was ‘OK’ to fail, since the main goal was to improve quality.

JPEmbedded took advantage of this event to verify features related to cybersecurity which seems to be a hot topic nowadays:

• secure MMS with certificate authentication,
• exchange of encryption keys with KDC,
• encryption of r-GOOSE.

Of course we identified some flaws in our implementations (they are already fixed ), but as long as software is created by humans we should still expect some imperfections, and the next possibility to spot them will be at IOP in 2021.