Securing smart electricity meters against customer attacks

In this paper, we propose and discuss the challenges of a novel method for securing the readings of smart electricity meters against tampering or malfunctioning. We apply the idea of linear error-correcting block codes, which has originally been used in detecting and correcting errors in data transmission, to detect and correct customer attacks aimed at changing the readings of smart electricity meters. We propose to use these codes, with some modifications, in order to detect and correct deceptive readings of a group of electricity meters measuring the energy delivered by cables/feeders fed from the same node/bus. We start by considering a single meter attack, and we show that the detection and correction of a single attack in the readings of 2^M−M−1 meters, connected to cables fed from the same node, requires only using M current transformers in addition to knowing the voltage at the common node. We demonstrate the theoretical implementation of this coding scheme, and then we discuss some practical challenges and their proposed solutions. Furthermore, extension to multi-error correcting codes, which are capable of detecting and correcting several simultaneous deceptive readings of a group of meters, is also discussed.