Page 101 - From Smart Grid to Internet of Energy

86 From smart grid to internet of energy

been proposed by standard development organizations as discussed earlier.
Moreover, device manufacturers and vendors pay serious attention to security
to ensure reliability of devices. AMI components are one of the key systems for
increasing entire system security by ensuring availability, reliability, and con-
formity to requirements. The AMI infrastructure is comprised by a wide variety
of devices with network and communication capabilities. Besides the smart
meters, customer gateways, communication networks, and AMI headend are
key components in an AMI ecosystem. The component related security issues
are confidentiality, integrity, availability, accountability, and authorization.
Confidentiality refers to customer privacy on personal informations such as
consumption behavior and patterns. The metered data and consumption rates,
periods, and durations may become an indicator about daily life of consumer.
In this context, the measurement and metering results should be securely stored
and should remain confidential by preventing unauthorized accesses. The AMI
communication networks should also prevent data transmission between con-
sumers to ensure confidentiality. The lack of confidentially may expose AMI
system to cyber-attacks and intrusions. An AMI system interfaced with HAN
over customer gateway should be seriously handled and privacy of system
should be ensured.
Integrity is related to security of metered and transmitted AMI data to utility
center. Integrity implies protecting data and commands of AMI system from
unauthorized accesses. The AMI systems are located at customer premises
and physically protected. However, cyber-attacks target to reach measured
metering data on transmission line between smart meters and monitoring center.
The smart meters may be posed to cyber-attacks of intruders to manipulate or
hack the measurement data. Therefore, smart meters transmission system
should detect and prevent cyber-attacks.
Availability ensures connectivity and ubiquitous data transmission through
the communication infrastructure between smart meter and utility control cen-
ter. The communication failures or physical problems prevent availability of
AMI system. In order to operate AMI system in a reliable way, availability
should be guaranteed by predefined controls or signaling procedures. Attacks
targeting the availability of system prevent accessibility and may cause critical
results since the system is not reachable on demand. Cyber physical system
(CPS) intrusion detection and automatic diagnostic algorithms perform the
detection methods of such attacks.
Accountability refers to reliability of remote control and metering compat-
ibility. It is also known as nonrepudiation and is related to financial applica-
tions. The metering results should be converted meaningful data with time
stamps and audit logs should be generated to ensure accountability. The contin-
uous time synchronization is crucial to acquire customer information, time of
use data, load and generation data. All the smart meter parameters such as con-
trol commands, tariffs, and stored data should be accountable for accurate
billing processes.