Api-do: Tools for Exploring the Wireless Attack Surface in Smart Meters

Security will be critical for the wireless interface offered by soon-to-be-ubiquitous smart meters -- since if not secure, this technology will provide an remotely accessible attack surface distributed throughout many homes and businesses. However, history shows that new network interfaces remained brittle and vulnerable (although believed otherwise) until security researchers could thoroughly explore their attack surface. Unfortunately, for the majority of currently available smart meter wireless networking solutions, we are still in that pre-exploration phase, "closed" radio stacks with proprietary features impede exploration by posing multiple hardware and software obstacles to standard network attack surface exploration techniques. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting open and extensible software tools for 802.15.4-based proprietary stacks that work on commodity digital radio platforms. We hope this contribution advances the state of the art beyond the pre-exploration tipping point, and toward real security.