Smart meters are of the basic elements in the so-called Smart Grid. These devices, connected to the Internet, keep bidirectional communication with other devices in the Smart Grid structure to allow remote readings and maintenance. As any other device connected to a network, smart meters become vulnerable to attacks with different purposes, like stealing data or altering readings. Nowadays, it is becoming more and more popular to buy and plug-and-play smart meters, additionally to those installed by the energy providers, to directly monitor the energy consumption at home. This option inherently entails security risks that are under the responsibility of householders. In this paper, we focus on an open solution based on Smartpi 2.0 devices with two purposes. On the one hand, we propose a network configuration and different data flows to exchange data (energy readings) in the home. These flows are designed to support collaborative among the devices in order to prevent external attacks and attempts of corrupting the data. On the other hand, we check the vulnerability by performing two kind of attacks (denial of service and stealing and changing data by using a malware). We conclude that, as expected, these devices are vulnerable to these attacks, but we provide mechanisms to detect both of them and to solve, by applying cooperation techniques.
Rebeca P. Díaz Redondo (https://iclab.det.uvigo.es/rebeca) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2367-2219) is an Associate Professor at the Telematics Engineering Department at the University of Vigo and researcher in the Information & Computing Laboratory (AtlantTIC Research Center). She is currently working on defining appropriate architectures for distributed and collaborative data analysis, especially thought for IoT solutions, where computation must be on the edge of the network (Fog Computing). Rebeca has participated in more than 40 projects and 25 works of technological transfer through contracts with companies and/or public institutions. She is currently involved in the scientific and technical activities of several national and European research & educative projects.
Ana Fernández Vilas (https://iclab.det.uvigo.es/avilas) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1047-2143) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Telematics Engineering of the University of Vigo and researcher in the Information & Computing Laboratory (AtlantTIC Research Center). She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Vigo in 2002. Her research activity at I&C lab focuses on Semantic- Social Intelligence & data mining. She looks for applying both to Ubiquitous Computing and Sensor Web; urban planning & learning analytics. Also, she is involved in several mobility & cooperation projects with North African countries & Western Balkans.
Gabriel Fernández dos Reis is a MsC student at the University of Vigo, who have developed his research within the Information & Computing Laboratory (https://iclab.det.uvigo.es/) at the AtlantTIC Research Center.
The interconnection of devices in electricity networks to support the exchange of data has become an essential aspect that electricity companies need to face. On the one hand, because it will enhance the self-knowledge of the infrastructure by a constant monitoring of data. On the other hand, because national and European regulations have strongly encouraged companies to update their systems to improve the efficiency of the energy consumption. This new infrastructure, usually known as Smart Grid, combines advances in both electric engineering and information and communication technology. Smart Grid leads to a more unified and simplified system for control, maintenance and management of the electricity grid, including generation, transmission, distribution, storage and trade.
Smart meters are of the basic elements in the so-called Smart Grid. These devices, connected to the Internet, keep bidirectional communication with other devices in the Smart Grid structure to allow remote readings and maintenance. As any other device connected to a network, smart meters become vulnerable to attacks with different purposes, like stealing data or altering readings. Nowadays, it is becoming more and more popular to buy and plug-and-play smart meters, additionally to those installed by the energy providers, to directly monitor the energy consumption at home. This option inherently entails security risks that are under the responsibility of householders.
This new philosophy takes into account an important aspect in energy production. The growing popularity of photovoltaic facilities and other energy systems has increased the number and variety of energy producers: customers cannot be considered as just consumers anymore, but also producers. This would entail a more efficient delivering of energy, by reducing costs and harmful emissions. Besides, the advantages of energy real-time readings are twofold: for consumers and for energy companies. On the one hand, consumers would be aware of their energy consumption, allowing them to adopt new consumption strategies. On the other hand, energy companies would infer consumption patterns and predict needs and potential peaks of activity to stablish appropriate energy plans and the best fees.
Figure 1.
The Smartpi 2.0 is a device that was designed by the German company nD-enerserve GmbH, which is specialized in products for energy management and optimization of self-consumption for smart homes and industrial environments. Besides the Smartpi 2.0, the company has developed other products like a unit to control power generation and power consumption or a screen for displaying data about energy efficiency or CO
2 production. These products (all based on the Linux operating system) are created to form a network with standardized interfaces that is easy to configure, which supports the energy connection between providers and consumers, and that includes different sensors. Their modular design and their combination of hardware and software offer a flexible and suitable solution.
More specifically, the Smartpi 2.0 consists of a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and an expansion module that allows the device to read amperage and, as a consequence, to read the power consumed. The device has four inputs: L1, L2, L3 and N (one for each phase and one for the neutral conductor); this way, power can be measured in three-phase systems. For single-phase systems, only L1 and N need to be connected. One interesting advantage is that the Raspberry Pi can be powered via the three voltage inputs, so an external power supply is not required. The voltage measurement also allows determining the direction of the energy flow, which offers a versatile measurement of both power generation and power consumption. The device has the following range of operation: Voltage (0–390 V), Amperage (0–100 A), Precision (2%) and Consumption (10 W).
For measurement management and communication between the devices, we have used the software that is included by default in the Smartpi 2.0 by the manufacturer (Smartpi version 0.18.5 and Raspberries version 0.20.5): Node-RED [
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payload, the content of the message.
According to their role in the information flow, nodes are classified into three types: (i) Input nodes, which introduce information in the flow that is usually gathered from a sensor or from an incoming IP packet; (ii) Output nodes, which do not forward the information to another node but to a database (to be stored) or to a console (to be debugged), for this the message is sent as an IP packet that exits the flow; and (iii) Intermediate nodes, which are all the other nodes that receive the message (input), modify the information and send the message (ouput).
Figure 2 shows an example of a simple flow with an input node, an intermediate one and an output one. When node Go is activated, a message is introduced in the flow, processed by node Hello! and displayed in the console thanks to node display.
Figure 2.
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1 with IP address 192.168.4.1 is the Smartpi 2.0, which will be the access point. Additionally, and in order to feed the devices with information, we have used synthetic data, since using real readings are not relevant for these experiments. In fact, in a real context (using Smartpi devices), the only modification needed would be replacing the input of data by the real measurements of the sensors if they are connected to a real power grid.
We have defined two basic flows for the devices interconnected in Fig. 1 to exchange data: a reading flow and a reception flow. We have done some modifications to the basic exchange data in order to add essential information for data gathering, such as the time of the energy reading and the node identifier. Thus, each packet include these three values: the energy reading, time of the reading and the node identifier that has obtained the data.
These two new flows allow all the devices in the domestic network to share their energy readings. This is key for the next flow, defined to try to protect the network against external attempts of corrupting the readings by injecting false readings in the system. Therefore, the third flow, defence flow, was designed to work as a defence against unauthorised alterations in the database. The main objective of this flow is to support a collaborative work among the domestic devices. The underlying idea is that each device compares its own the energy readings with the previous ones locally obtained. When an anomalies is detected, the device asks the readings to its neighbours to compare the data. Therefore, the designed defence flow is composed of two parts or steps. The first one focuses on the local analysis of the data, whereas the second one focuses on a procedure to collaborative decide if a unusual energy reading is, indeed, a right energy reading or a potentially altered one.
Testing in IoT networks usually covers the following aspects. First, probing attacks for information gathering, which try to collect information illegitimately from remote systems through scanning or fingerprinting. Second, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which try to overwhelm the resources with illegitimate requests. These attacks are based on TCP, UDP and HTTP protocols. Finally, information theft to get confidential or sensitive data. In order to test the infrastructure and the collaborative communication scheme, we have selected two of the most frequent attacks: DoS, which tries to infringe the third pillar of the CIA (Availability); and the False Data Injection using a malware to infringe the other two pillars of CIA (Confidentiality and Integrity).