Privacy and Security Threats from Smart Meters Technology

Abstract

Energy smart meters have become very popular, advantaging the general public and utility companies via instant energy monitoring, and modelling, respectively. The information available from smart metering could however be used maliciously with the use of non-intrusive load monitoring technology. In this paper, we explore the vectors for attack on the smart metering network, showing physical and logical locations from which data could be stolen; and show how socio-economic, health related, occupancy, and multi-media viewing habits can be estimated to a high accuracy, thus posing a threat to users' privacy and security.