Smart meter security: a survey

Europe’s smart metering initiative may be the largest engineering project ever undertaken in the region; it is significantly larger than the Channel Tunnel. The European Parliament mandated the replacement of electricity meters with new ‘smart’ meters by 2022, except in Member States who certify this year that it would be uneconomic. This project could cost over $100 billion, and will involve non-trivial engineering challenges, a number of which touch on security and privacy issues. In fact, it is a fascinating case study in security economics: systems are much harder to protect when incentives conflict, and smart metering exposes perverse incentives galore. Nonpayment is a major concern for the utilities, whose main goal is to move defaulting customers to prepayment remotely, rather than having to roll a truck. But prior experience from countries with widespread prepayment metering suggests that it may increase technical fraud. Second, fine-grained energy consumption data reveal a lot of information about house occupants’ behaviour, leading to serious privacy concerns. Third, the industry is worried that over-regulation could significantly increase the cost of the project, following negative experiences of regulatory mechanisms in smart grid projects to modernise transmission and distribution networks. Fourth, there is growing concern that centrally controllable electricity meters could be vulnerable to attack by a state-level or substate adversary. Fifth, there are serious conflicts of interest between the energy retailers who will operate the meters in most countries, the customers, and governments, which may undermine the goals of the project and which may be made worse by myopic architectural choices. Finally, the lack of a viable framework for communication between smart meters and appliances in the home will not merely lead to lack of interoperability, but could thwart competition and is likely to frustrate one of the main project goals: that future smart grids can provide demand response by tailoring the demand for energy rapidly to supply fluctuations. Without demand response, much less of our energy can come from fluctuating sources such as wind and solar. If we want to maximise the use of renewables, we will need a more incentive-compatible system architecture, and we discuss some possible first steps.