Evaluation of Cybersecurity Threats on Smart Metering System

Abstract

Smart metering has emerged as the next-generation of energy distribution, consumption, and monitoring systems via the convergence of power engineering and information and communication technology (ICT) integration otherwise known as smart grid systems. While the innovation is advancing the future power generation, distribution, energy consumption information delivery, the success of the platform is positively correlated to the successful integration and stability of technologies upon which the system is built. Nonetheless, the rising trend of cybersecurity attacks on cyber infrastructure and its dependent systems coupled with the systems inherent vulnerabilities present a source of concern not only to the vendors but also the consumers. These security concerns need to be addressed in order to increase consumer confidence so as to ensure greatest adoption and success of smart metering. In this paper, we present a functional communication architecture of the smart metering system. Following that, we demonstrate and discuss the taxonomy of smart metering common vulnerabilities exposure, upon which sophisticated threats can capitalize. We then introduce countermeasure techniques, whose integration is considered pivotal for achieving security protection against existing and future sophisticated attacks on smart metering systems.

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“…It is used to transmit data to service providers using various types of communication links where this information is used for customer billing, load balancing, energy consumption analysis, and price optimization. The cybersecurity threats related to the smart grids and meters include [39,45,46,62,97,97,107]:…”

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“…2) Vulnerabilities in the applications: An application deals with metering data management and other value added services (e.g., automated billing and demand response program) for the consumers. However, exploiting software flaws and accidental misconfiguration, an attacker may lead to cyber threat, e.g., inappropriate data delivery scheduling from millions of smart meters, as discussed in [70].…”