Simulation and Analysis of Intrusion Resilient Smart Metering System

Abstract

AbstractTwo dominant factors that impact the future of electrical energy systems of the era are government policies, and the efficiency needs of the consumers. The electrical energy system of the future should investigate the basic requirements and concerns raised by some utilities, by using the latest technologies to create a sustainable, smarter, and highly efficient smart grid. A smart grid is an electrical infrastructure that makes use of information, communication, computational intelligence, and consumption to achieve a clean, safe, reliable, resilient, efficient, and sustainable electrical energy system. One of the main sub-structures of the smart grid is AMI, i.e., advanced metering infrastructure. The smart meter is an intelligent device that has capabilities of communication and management of data. These systems measure, collect, and analyze energy usage and send the data over communication networks. The main goal of this work is to create a testbed to analyze the effects of security attacks on the smart metering system and a simulation environment. The work also includes the execution of attacks like distributed denial of service (DDoS) and man in the middle (MITM) on the physical testbed and simulation environment and implements the prevention mechanisms for the same. The physical testbed is designed using Arduino mega microcontroller (integrated with ESP8266) and Raspberry Pi microprocessor. The simulation environment is developed using Docker containers. The DDoS attack is performed using low orbit ion cannon (LOIC), and the MITM attack is performed using the ARP spoofing technique. The attacks were successfully carried out on the simulation environment and the physical smart meter testbed, exposing the vulnerabilities in the current infrastructure. The prevention mechanisms are also implemented/suggested for the performed attacks (DDoS, MITM).KeywordsSmart meterDDoS attackMan-in-the-middle attackSimulation environmentPhysical smart meter testbedDockerLOICARP spoof