CS 201 | Elisha Choe, Sandia National Labs

“Goaltender: Cloud-Based Defense and Response Tools for the Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Ecosystem”

Modern Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Management Systems (DERMS) and Charging Station Management System (CSMS) are protected at cloud boundary with firewall and IDS systems representing a perimeter defense approach. But they lack introspection capability upon data before reaching legitimate backend systems.

Goaltender provides defense-in-depth solutions for Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Management Systems (DERMS) with Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solutions using various tools including ML/AI techniques.

This will prevent XML External Entity (XXE) injection, Log4Shell, and other code injection attacks on backend systems when these payloads are embedded in communication protocols.

The project consists of two research and development components.

1) Inspect encrypted traffic at the cloud/utility firewall
2) Create automated remediation approaches that account for the severity and probability of the breach

Yung Ryn (Elisha) Choe, PhD, CISSP is a Systems and Cybersecurity Researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. He received Bachelor of Science (B.S) in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University. He was a Senior Software Engineer at Analog Devices, Inc. and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Purdue University.
He joined Sandia in 2008 and has been successfully delivering multiple projects as a Principal Investigator for DOE, DHS, and DOD. He led Distributed Energy Resources, Nuclear Deterrence (ND), Cloud Security, and 5G/mobile Cyber projects. He has 20 years of experience including 7 years in private sector and 16 years at Sandia.
He is also active in the research community publishing over 20 peer-reviewed research papers and serving in various Technical Program Committees such as ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) and others.
His research interests include Computer and Network Security, Distributed Energy Resources, Electrical Vehicles, Nuclear Deterrence, Cloud Computing, IoT, large-scale distributed computing with Hadoop MapReduce, Database Systems, Storage Server for Video-on-Demand (VoD), and Embedded Systems.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Jan 15, 2026
4:00 pm - 5:45 pm

Location:
3400 Boelter Hall
420 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles California 90095