Secure Design Patterns for Security in Smart Metering Systems

A security by design approach for smart metering, using secure design patterns, is introduced in this paper. There are concerns that the security vulnerabilities in smart metering systems can be exploited on a large scale. On an individual level, smart meters can be made to provide false metering data to the service providers. On the collective level, the smart grids can be attacked to bring down the national grid or parts of it, which is a concern of national security. A list of possible security attacks on the smart metering systems is identified and summarized in this paper. It is well known that secure design patterns reduce the design flaws in a system. State of the art smart metering systems do not follow the standardized software development processes. A security pattern based engineering approach for developing secure software for smart metering systems is introduced in the paper. The secure design patterns are stored in a repository of patterns using pattern modeling tools. The engineering process and corresponding modeling tools were developed during the EU project, entitled "Trusted Computing Engineering for Resource Constraint Embedded Systems Applications".