Secure smart metering based on LoRa technology

Smart metering allows Substation Automation System (SAS) to remotely and timely read smart meters. Despite its advantages, smart metering brings some challenges. a) It introduces cyber attack risks to the metering system, which may lead to user privacy leakage or even the compromise of smart metering systems. b) Although the majority of meters are located within a regional power supply area, some hard-to-reach nodes are geographically far from the clustered area, which account for a big portion of the entire smart metering operation cost. Facing the above challenges, we propose a secure smart metering infrastructure based on LoRa technology which facilitates long-range wireless communications. We adopt symmetric cryptography to protect the end-to-end communication between the SAS and the smart meter. Moreover, in order to maintain a long-term security of the proposed metering system, we design a key management protocol to update the keys periodically. Implementation and experiment are presented to evaluate the usability of our system. Finally, the potentiality of the proposed system being applicable to the generalized utility metering is discussed.