Smart electricity meters are being introduced in countries all over the world. The meters record the power consumption of consumers and communicate the information to the utility companies for monitoring and billing purposes.

The smart meter unit is a hardware device that runs dedicated software. Just like other devices that process and store electronic data, it is important that sensitive information be protected. For smart meters in particular, consumer-specific information must be protected from disclosure for privacy reasons and consumption-specific details must be protected against tampering to guarantee a correct billing process.

With our broad experience on IT hardware security we evaluate smart meter units with a number of different methods and tools to identify possible security gaps in the implementation. The following methods can be applied, depending on the level of protection that a smart meter is supposed to provide:
  • Physical analysis to test the tamper resistance and the implemented tamper detection mechanism
  • Physical analysis to attempt to retrieve sensitive consumer information and/or utility company data that is stored in the smart meter unit
  • Hardware-oriented analysis techniques and tools focusing on the meter’s microcontroller to retrieve or modify sensitive information that is stored in the smart meter unit
When a security analysis of the network infrastructure of the utility company is required, we cooperate with experienced network specialists. Please contact us at info@brightsight.com, if you need more information.