Light-Weight Security for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Smart meters (SMs) in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) are physically accessible due to which the protection against eavesdropping of AMI and energy theft control have gained utmost importance. A light-weight security solution is the requirement for AMI networks because of the small size and less computational capabilities of SMs. To address this problem, a light-weight security solution is proposed in this paper to detect any adversarial node in between two SMs. Through the proposed algorithms, adversarial node can be detected in AMI. Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is used to generate link fingerprints after every 60 seconds, which are sent to the Data Concentrator Unit (DCU). The DCU applies these algorithms on the received link fingerprints in order to detect any unwanted activity. MICAz motes are used as communication module of SM and adversary to generate RSSI values. These RSSI values are simulated in MATLAB in which it detects adversarial node or meter tempering with 100% accuracy by getting values other than 0 and 1 as the average of consecutive RSSI and distance between the RSSI of connected SMs.