Security issues in smart metering systems

Intelligent buildings are not imaginable anymore without smart metering devices. Smart metering systems are used not only for the provisioning of instantaneous metering information on commodities, such as electricity, water and gas, to the service providers but also to make this information available to customers. This helps the customers in dynamically adapting their energy consumption behavior. The smart metering devices also help in balancing the power generation and distribution in a smart grid by tailoring the power generation according to the demand. However, the liberalization of the metering market requires few strong security and privacy requirements for the metering data. Smart metering raises many security and privacy concerns. There are worries that the personal information of consumers could be disclosed. There are also concerns about frauds exploiting security vulnerabilities in smart metering systems on a large scale, e.g., making smart meters provide false metering data to the service providers. From a macro perspective, the smart grids, including the smart metering systems and devices can be attacked to bring down the whole grid or at least some parts of the grid, which is a concern of national security. This paper focuses on the security and privacy aspects of the smart metering systems. Potential attackers, security threats and attacks on smart metering systems are listed and the security approaches to address the security issues are presented. A security by design approach for secure smart metering is discussed in the paper. The major results of a security by design approach for smart metering systems developed in the project, entitled “Trusted Computing Engineering for Resource Constraint Embedded Systems Applications”, funded by the European commission, are summarized in the end.