Wireless Smart Electric Meter Operation under Data Security Attacks

Wireless Smart meters are increasingly being deployed by the utility companies to remotely collect power consumption data from customer premise periodically in real time. It gives utility companies the information needed to efficiently administer their customers for their electricity usage. Knowing how critical these data are, it is important to ensure that data recorded locally at the smart meters or communicated remotely or wirelessly are both confidential and reliable. Despite the efforts being made to secure the smart meter data, security threats on smart meters continue to evolve at the same time, with an increasing number of security breaches happening each year. At this time, not much research has been done to measure data breaches for commercially available wireless smart meters, and how they translate financial problems for the companies using such wireless smart meters. In this paper, we perform experiments to evaluate the effects of data security attacks on a wireless smart meter to understand impact on remote data collection, and how the compromised power consumption data would impact a utility company.