Secure Smart Metering Research Articles

PFSS: a privacy-friendly and secure smart metering for time of use operational data collection in smart grid network

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is an integral part of smart grid network that involves transmission of finest grain operational data of consumers' load profiles on wireless facilities. Unauthorised access to these data due to the vulnerabilities of wireless facilities may easily disrupt smart grid. Some of the existing schemes only focus on specific attack(s), leaving other attacks, and most of them cannot be used to secure energy profiles from different time of use without increasing communication overhead. In this paper, a provably lightweight security scheme to secure metering and information exchange and consumers' privacies irrespective of the attacking points and nature of the attacks is proposed for AMI. Our scheme ensures data security and cooperative aggregation among m number of consumers of the same service provider. The security analysis and performance evaluation of the scheme are also presented. The results illustrate that the approach secures metering at a low overhead.

PFSS: a privacy-friendly and secure smart metering for time of use operational data collection in smart grid network

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is an integral part of smart grid network that involves transmission of finest grain operational data of consumers' load profiles on wireless facilities. Unauthorised access to these data due to the vulnerabilities of wireless facilities may easily disrupt smart grid. Some of the existing schemes only focus on specific attack(s), leaving other attacks, and most of them cannot be used to secure energy profiles from different time of use without increasing communication overhead. In this paper, a provably lightweight security scheme to secure metering and information exchange and consumers' privacies irrespective of the attacking points and nature of the attacks is proposed for AMI. Our scheme ensures data security and cooperative aggregation among m number of consumers of the same service provider. The security analysis and performance evaluation of the scheme are also presented. The results illustrate that the approach secures metering at a low overhead.

Balancing Security and Efficiency for Smart Metering Against Misbehaving Collectors

Smart grid enables two-way communications between smart meters and operation centers to collect real-time power consumption of customers to improve flexibility, reliability, and efficiency of the power system. It brings serious privacy issues to customers, since the meter readings possibly expose customers’ activities in the house. Data encryption can protect the readings, but lengthens the data size. Secure data aggregation improves communication efficiency and preserves customers’ privacy, while fails to support dynamic billing, or offer integrity protection against public collectors, which may be hacked in reality. In this paper, we define a new security model to formalize the misbehavior of collectors, in which the misbehaving collectors may launch pollution attacks to corrupt power consumption data. Under this model, we propose a novel privacy-preserving smart metering scheme to prevent pollution attacks for the balance of security and efficiency in smart grid. It achieves end-to-end security, data aggregation, and integrity protection against the misbehaving collectors, which act as local gateways to collect and aggregate usage data and forward to operation centers. As a result, the misbehaving collectors cannot access or corrupt power usage data of customers. In addition, we design a dynamic billing mechanism based on individual power consumption maintained on collectors with the verification of customers. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves secure smart metering and verifiable dynamic billing against misbehaving collectors with low computational and communication overhead.

Design Key Management System for DLMS/COSEM Standard-based Smart Metering

Background/Objectives: Security features are an essential part of recent smart metering systems. Smart meters are considered an important facility that must be protected by applying the latest security technologies.Methods/Statistical analysis: Security context determines the rules for applying/verifying security. DLMS/COSEM have Security suite to set of cryptographic algorithms. This is based on symmetric key based cryptographic communication. The high level security requires public key based cryptographic communication and digital signature.The security specification references the key scheme of DLMS-COSEM, which is based on a single set of unique symmetric keys per meter.Findings: we have studied a sequence for distributing security keys required by DLMS / COSEM.Our smart metering key distribution system can provide a security key management system such as key generation / distribution between AMI components. This is a PKI-based authentication using public key method (ECC), and a DLMS standard key distribution method after generating a session key using a public key. This system can also provide a key management scheme between DLMS clients not defined in the DLMS standard.Improvements/Applications: we analyze security requirements of DLMS/COSEM for secure smart metering and design key distribution/management method.

Hybrid Cryptography Algorithm with Precomputation for Advanced Metering Infrastructure Networks

Two-way communication has been identified as the smart grid flagship feature that enables the smart grid to attain its outcomes over the legacy power grid. Integrating communication networks into the power grid will motivate malicious attackers to target information exchange. Therefore, achieving secure and authentic communication in the smart grid networks is an indispensable requirement. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated hybrid encryption scheme that incorporates public and symmetric key encryptions to secure smart metering network. Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) and Advanced Encryption Scheme (AES) are chosen as the building blocks for the proposed scheme. In order to optimize the computation overhead of ECIES, a precomputation procedure is presented to provide faster encryption/decryption. The proposed technique provides data integrity, confidentiality and authenticity as well as it resists against false data injection and message reply attacks. Simulation results show that the proposed approach surpasses some of the existing schemes in terms of computation, communication and storage overhead.

Architecture and Development of Secure Communication Solutions for Smart Grid Applications

The communication technologies for automatic me- ter reading (smart metering) and for energy production and distribution networks (smart grid) have the potential to be one of the first really highly scaled machine-to-machine-(M2M)- applications. During the last years two very promising devel- opments around the wireless part of smart grid communication were initialized, which possibly have an impact on the markets far beyond Europe and far beyond energy automation.  Besides the specifications of the Open Metering System (OMS) Group, the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI) has designed a protection profile (PP) and a technical directive (TR) for the communication unit of an intelligent measurement sys- tem (smart meter gateway), which were released in March 2013. This design uses state-of-the-art technologies and prescribes their implementation in real-life systems. At first sight the expenditures for the prescribed solutions seem to be significant. But in the long run, this path is inevitable and comes with strategic advantages. Index Terms—BSI protection profile, secure smart meter gate- way, PKI