Securing Smart Meters Through Physical Properties of Their Components

Abstract

This article presents a security strategy to protect smart meters against attacks that compromise critical electronic components. Many of these attacks consist of stealing energy by manipulating smart meters’ measurements. For example, a malicious entity can replace or tamper with components that execute measuring procedures and store sensitive parameters. This type of attack is common on devices, such as smart meters, that are part of environments considered hostile, where attackers have easy access to the device. Therefore, it is necessary to develop techniques in which physical manipulations on smart meters by attackers are unsuccessful. Our strategy uses physical properties from these components to create secure identities for the meter. We present two main contributions. The first one is inspired by physical unclonable functions and extracts unique identifiers from SRAM components. Then, we combine these identifiers to create a strong identity. The other contribution uses physical context information from the voltage levels in the smart meter’s power supply to yield dynamic context identities. We also validate our proposals in experiments using a hardware prototype that embeds Arduino microprocessors, SRAM memories, and voltage sensors. The results show that our idea is suitable for implementation in real smart meters and can help protect these devices from attacks against their components.