Resource Constrained Smart Meters Research Articles

Introducing edge intelligence to smart meters via federated split learning

The ubiquitous smart meters are expected to be a central feature of future smart grids because they enable the collection of massive amounts of fine-grained consumption data to support demand-side flexibility. However, current smart meters are not smart enough. They can only perform basic data collection and communication functions and cannot carry out on-device intelligent data analytics due to hardware constraints in terms of memory, computation, and communication capacity. Moreover, privacy concerns have hindered the utilization of data from distributed smart meters. Here, we present an end-edge-cloud federated split learning framework to enable collaborative model training on resource-constrained smart meters with the assistance of edge and cloud servers in a resource-efficient and privacy-enhancing manner. The proposed method is validated on a hardware platform to conduct building and household load forecasting on smart meters that only have 192 KB of static random-access memory (SRAM). We show that the proposed method can reduce the memory footprint by 95.5%, the training time by 94.8%, and the communication burden by 50% under the distributed learning framework and can achieve comparable or superior forecasting accuracy to that of conventional methods trained on high-capacity servers.

Blockchain-based anonymous authentication and data aggregation for advanced metering infrastructure in smart grid

This paper proposes a blockchain-based scheme, focusing on anonymous identity authentication and data aggregation, for safer and more reliable bidirectional communication between the utility company and power consumers based on Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Firstly, to cope with the mutual identity authentication between resource-constrained Smart Meters, a lightweight anonymous authentication strategy is designed using Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Meanwhile, a reputation-based consensus protocol is developed to accomplish data aggregation in AMI by using decentralization and non-tampering features of the blockchain. During the communication, in each time slot, the proposed scheme only needs to select a trusted user randomly to undertake the mining node rather than to introduce a third-party in a centralized manner to summarize and record the user-side data into the blockchain. Such scheme can effectively prevent data tampering and also be effective to decrease the processing complexity. The AVISPA tool is adopted to formally evaluate its security. The simulation results show promising performance. The proposed scheme not only can guarantee secure communication but also effectively decrease the computational cost in AMI.

Lightweight and dynamic authenticated key agreement and management protocol for smart grid

With the development of IoT and 5G, the smart grid, as one of the key component for the smart city, can provide the uninterrupted and reliable electricity service by properly adjusting the electricity supply according to the consumption of users. The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), as an important part of smart grid system, is a complete network and system for measuring, collecting, storing and analyzing the electricity consumption information of users. The security of AMI plays a vital role in the smooth operation of smart grid. In this paper, we study how to establish the secure communication between two entities in AMI, namely the smart meter and the electricity service provider. Although, there are many authentication and key management protocols for AMI, the high complexity and computation overhead of these protocols hinder their application in the smart grid environment. Based on identity cryptosystem and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), we put forward a lightweight and dynamic authenticated key agreement and management protocol, which can significantly reduce the computation overhead of the resource-constrained smart meters. In addition, we utilize a one-way key tree technique to efficiently generate and update the group key in the multicast communication. We give a systematic proof to show that our designed protocol not only guarantees the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted messages, but also resists various attacks from an adversary. Finally, we carry out some simulated experiments to demonstrate the high efficiency of our designed protocol.

Identity-Based Verifiable Aggregator Oblivious Encryption and Its Applications in Smart Grids

Verifiable aggregator oblivious encryption is a useful notion that not only allows an untrusted aggregator to compute aggregated data without learning any other information but also requires the aggregator to generate a proof of the aggregated data so that anyone can verify the accuracy. Since the aggregator does not learn data that may reveal users' private information and also cannot forge the aggregated data, verifiable aggregator oblivious encryption is suitable for privacy-preserving smart metering. However, NIST has recommended not using public-key-based cryptography in the smart grid because public-key cryptography cannot provide sufficient scalability. Thus, we propose a notion of identity-based verifiable aggregator oblivious encryption and design concrete schemes in this paper. We prove the aggregator oblivious security and aggregator unforgeability of our schemes via the smooth projective hash function and computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. Furthermore, based on our identity-based verifiable aggregator oblivious encryption scheme, we propose an identity-based data aggregation protocol for the smart grid and provide a security analysis in the context of seven typical attacks on smart grids. The implementation of our protocol via the Intel Edison platform shows that it is sufficiently lightweight for resource-constrained smart meters.

Lightweight and secure PUF-based authenticated key agreement scheme for smart grid

Smart Grid technology with the help of Information Technology (IT) adds many benefits to the traditional grids, but security concerns and especially privacy preserving of users is still a major practical issue. Establishing a secure and reliable communication channel between smart meters and service provider can guarantee data privacy in AMI network. This secure channel can be established with data encryption using a session key which is generated during an authentication scheme. This scheme should be enough lightweight to implement on resource constrained smart meters in delay sensitive AMI network. In this work, we analyze proposed PUF-based authenticated key agreement scheme by Gope et al. and show that their scheme is vulnerable in CK-adversary model and does not provide session key secrecy and backward secrecy. We propose an end-to-end PUF-based key agreement scheme between smart meters and service provider in AMI network which is secure against physical tampering attack and also it provides security in CK-Adversary model for ephemeral leakage attack. Our scheme imposes low communication and computational costs to smart meters. We analyze the security of our proposed scheme against popular attacks and verify its security by using widely accepted scyther tool.

Secure and Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Smart Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grid

In this article, a secure and lightweight authentication scheme, which provides trust, anonymity, and mutual authentication, with reduced energy, communicational, and computational overheads, is proposed for resource-constrained smart meters (SMs). The designed mutual authentication-based key agreement protocol leverages the advantages of fully hashed menezes-qu-vanstone key exchange mechanism along with Elliptic curve cryptography and one-way hash functions. Moreover, it allows to securely establish and verify the trust between the two communicating parties, i.e., SMs and neighbourhood area network gateway. These entities communicate over the insecure channel and form an important component of the smart metering infrastructure. Furthermore, extensive performance evaluation validates the supremacy of the designed protocol over the state-of-the-art in furnishing higher security features with minimal communicational and computational overheads. The obtained results also reflect that the proposed protocol is fit for implementation on resource-constrained SMs as it leads to minimal energy consumption.

SecGrid: A Secure and Efficient SGX-Enabled Smart Grid System With Rich Functionalities

Smart grid adopts two-way communication and rich functionalities to gain a positive impact on the sustainability and efficiency of power usage, but on the other hand, also poses serious challenges to customers' privacy. Existing solutions in smart grid usually use cryptographic tools, such as homomorphic encryption, to protect individual privacy, which, however, can only support limited and simple functionalities. Moreover, the resource-constrained smart meters need to perform heavy asymmetric cryptography in these solutions, which is not applied to smart grid. In this paper, we present a practical and secure SGX-enabled smart grid system, named SecGrid. Our system leverage trusted hardware SGX to ensure that grid utilities can efficiently execute rich functionalities on customers' private data, while guaranteeing their privacy. With the designed security protocols, the SecGrid only require the smart meters to perform AES encryption. Security analysis shows that SecGrid can thwart various attacks from malicious adversaries. Experimental results show that SecGrid is much faster than the existing privacy-preserving schemes in smart grid.

Privacy-Aware Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Smart Grid Communication

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are one of the underpinning platforms of smart grids, facilitating efficient grid management and operation, optimization of resource utilization, as well as enabling new products, features, and services. However, this interconnection of grid technology with ICT leads to various security challenges in the power grid. One such concern is the tampering of usage data from smart meters which may result not only in incorrect billing, but also in incorrect decisions related to demand and supply management. In addition to network based cyber attacks, smart meters are also susceptible to physical attacks since they are installed in customer premises without hardware protection mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-aware authenticated key agreement scheme which can not only ensure secure communication between smart meters and the service providers, but also the physical security of smart meters. In this regard, we utilize the lightweight cryptographic primitives such as physically uncloneable functions and one-way hash function, etc. Hence, the proposed scheme is even suitable for the resource constrained smart meters.

Lightweight and Privacy-Friendly Spatial Data Aggregation for Secure Power Supply and Demand Management in Smart Grids

The concept of smart metering allows real-time measurement of power demand which in turn is expected to result in more efficient energy use and better load balancing. However, finely granular measurements reported by smart meters can lead to starkly increased exposure of sensitive information, including various personal attributes and activities. Even though several security solutions have been proposed in recent years to address this issue, most of the existing solutions are based on public-key cryptographic primitives, such as homomorphic encryption and elliptic curve digital signature algorithms which are ill-suited for the resource constrained smart meters. On the other hand, to address the computational inefficiency issue, some masking-based solutions have been proposed. However, these schemes cannot ensure some of the imperative security properties, such as consumer’s privacy and sender authentication. In this paper, we first propose a lightweight and privacy-friendly masking-based spatial data aggregation scheme for secure forecasting of power demand in smart grids. Our scheme only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as hash functions and exclusive-OR operations. Subsequently, we propose a secure billing solution for smart grids. As compared with existing solutions, our scheme is simple and can ensure better privacy protection and computational efficiency, which are essential for smart grids.

More efficient key establishment protocol for smart grid communications: Design and experimental evaluation on ARM-based hardware

The aging infrastructure of the existing power grid is envisioned to be replaced by smart grid. The main achievement of this new technology is bidirectional digital communications. These types of communications are susceptible to numerous security threats. The key establishment protocols play a vital role in offering secure communication channels. Hereupon, in recent years, a number of key establishment protocols have been suggested to be used in the context of smart grid. Nonetheless, delving into the existing protocols of this field demonstrates that the secure schemes are not quite lightweight to be used by the resource-constrained smart meters and most of the recently-published ones are insecure against well-known attacks. Therefore, to remedy these challenges, this paper proposes a novel key establishment protocol that not only is secure under the strict Canetti and Krawczyk threat model, but also is more efficient in terms of both running time and communication overhead than the protocols presented thus far. The security analysis, which is done in both a descriptive informal manner and using an automatic formal verifier, together with an exhaustive comparative efficiency analysis confirm the claim of this paper. Moreover, to give realistic running time on a proper hardware for the smart meters, we have taken the advantage of an ARM microcontroller from the STM Company in order to implement the different cryptographic elements, which are used in the proposed scheme, and to evaluate its efficiency under two use case scenarios. We hope that the achieved results be beneficial for similar future researches in this field.

An Anonymous ECC-Based Self-Certified Key Distribution Scheme for the Smart Grid

In the smart grid, the various stakeholders can communicate securely and efficiently only if they employ a proper key distribution scheme. In recent years, a number of key distribution schemes have been proposed to be used in the context of the smart grid. However, some suffer from security challenges, some do not provide the smart meter anonymity, some require high communication and computational costs that make them less suitable for the resource-constrained smart meters, some are based on the public key infrastructure, and most of the newly published ones have the key escrow problem. Therefore, to remedy these challenges, in this paper, we propose an anonymous elliptic curve cryptography-based self-certified key distribution scheme that not only is free from the overhead of the certificate management and the key escrow issue, but also is more efficient than anonymous schemes in terms of both communication and computational costs. More significantly, we have implemented the cryptographic elements on two state-of-the-art ARM chips. First, a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller as a candidate for the smart meter and second, a 64-bit Octa core ARM Cortex-A53 as a candidate for the service provider. We hope that the achieved results be beneficial for other future researches in this field.

Energy, Traffic Load, and Link Quality Aware Ad Hoc Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network Based Smart Metering Infrastructure

Electricity industry is in the midst of revolutionary transition from outdated ageing power infrastructure to an intelligent sophisticated smart grid network utilizing modern communication technologies to enhance power generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption. Smart metering infrastructure is an integral part of the smart power grid revolution. Smart meters, in addition to their primary billing functions, serve as distributed Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes for enhancing grid reliability. Existing ad hoc routing protocols are based on single routing criterion such as hop count. This single routing metric approach can overload and deplete resource constrained smart meters along preferred paths. A protocol is needed which is aware of energy level and traffic congestion of smart metering nodes. In addition, protocol should select route based on link quality for optimal routing. In this paper, a novel WSN ad hoc routing protocol ETL-AODV is proposed for reliable and energy efficient communication of smart metering nodes. Three simulation based case studies are conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed protocol, and relative comparison is provided based on four metrics: (i) packet delivery ratio (PDR), (ii) normalized routing load (NRL) (iii) average energy consumption and (iv) average end-to-end delay.