Book excerpt: Correlating cyber security with specific communication standards is very complex and is not a one-to-one correlation. First, communication standards for the Smart Grid are designed to meet many different requirements at many different 'layers' in the communications 'stack' or 'profile.' Some standards address the lower layers of the stack, such as wireless media, fiber optic cables, and power line carrier. Others address the 'transport' layers for getting messages from one location to another. Still others cover the 'application' layers, the semantic structures of the information as it is transmitted between software applications. In addition, there are communication standards that are strictly abstract models of information - the relationships of pieces of information with each other. Since they are abstract, cyber security technologies cannot be linked to them until they are translated into 'bits and bytes' by mapping them to one of the semantic structures. Secondly, regardless of what communications standards are used, cyber security must address all layers - end-to-end - from the source of the data to the ultimate destination of the data. In addition, cyber security must address many aspects outside of the communications system that typically rely on procedures rather than technologies, such as authenticating the users and software applications, and screening personnel. Cyber security must also address how to: cope during an attack, recover from it afterwards, and create a trail of information to be used in post-attack analysis. Communications standards do not address the importance of specific data or how it might be used in systems; these standards only address how to exchange the data. Therefore, cyber security must be viewed as a stack or 'profile' of different security technologies and procedures, woven together to meet the security requirements of a particular implementation of a stack of communication standards designed to provide specific services.