  Hydropower facilities are often remotely monitored or controlled from a
centralized remote-control room. Additionally, major component manufacturers
monitor the performance of installed components. While these communications
enable efficiencies and increased reliability, they also expand the
cyber-attack surface. Communications may use the internet to remote control a
facility's control systems, or it may involve sending control commands over a
network from a control room to a machine. The content could be encrypted and
decrypted using a public key to protect the communicated information. These
cryptographic encoding and decoding schemes have been shown to be vulnerable, a
situation which is being exacerbated as more advances are made in computer
technologies such as quantum computing. In contrast, quantum key distribution
(QKD) is not based upon a computational problem, and offers an alternative to
conventional public-key cryptography. Although the underlying mechanism of QKD
ensures that any attempt by an adversary to observe the quantum part of the
protocol will result in a detectable signature as an increased error rate,
potentially even preventing key generation, it serves as a warning for further
investigation. When the error rate is low enough and enough photons have been
detected, a shared private key can be generated known only to the sender and
receiver. We describe how this novel technology and its several modalities
could benefit the critical infrastructures of dams or hydropower facilities.
The presented discussions may be viewed as a precursor to a quantum
cybersecurity roadmap for the identification of relevant threats and
mitigation.
