S3MP: A SCION based Secure Smart Metering Platform Tony John Networks and Distributed Systems (Netsys) Lab Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg Magdeburg, Germany tony.john@st.ovgu.de David Hausheer Networks and Distributed Systems (Netsys) Lab Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg Magdeburg, Germany hausheer@ovgu.de Abstract—The number of smart meters deployed around the world is increasing every day. Soon, all energy meters will be smart meters, especially in developed countries. The data from smart meters will enable energy companies to manage their distribution more efficiently and reduce wastage. It eliminates the monthly manual meter readings and enables energy companies to implement services like dynamic pricing. Along with the many benefits of smart meters, it raises various privacy and security concerns. Hackers gaining access to them can cause blackouts and other catastrophic failures. The energy consumption data can reveal many household characteristics using off the shelf statistical methods raising privacy concerns. Energy companies should make sure that the smart meter data does not fall into the wrong hands. Smart metering infrastructures ultimately use the Internet for communication, making it vulnerable to present- day Internet security flaws. The SCION network architecture is a secure next-generation Internet architecture that aims to overcome the flaws of today’s Internet, especially in terms of security and privacy. This paper presents the design of a secure smart metering platform on top of the SCION network. Furthermore, a prototypical implementation of the proposed approach is developed and evaluated. We show that with our approach it is possible to achieve a high resilience against potential attacks without compromising on performance. Index Terms—SCION, Smart Metering, privacy, security I. I NTRODUCTION Internet of Things (IoT) applications are getting more and more widely adopted. The number of IoT devices is growing exponentially every year. Bain predicts that the IoT market will grow to over $500 Billion in 2021 [1]. At the same time, security is still considered the most significant concern in adopting IoT technology, especially in enterprises. Potential threats include weak authentication facilitating unauthorized access, unencrypted communication leaking privacy-sensitive data, and insufficient availability for critical infrastructures. Our aim in this paper is to provide a secure IoT platform for smart metering. Smart meters are intelligent power meters deployed at customers’ premises, enabling a remote reading and processing of measured power data and thus allowing a more efficient and sustainable handling of the power grid [2]. With the number of deployed smart meters increasing day by day, the privacy and security concerns regarding the collected data are also increasing [3], [4]. Privacy of the smart meter data is of high importance as granular energy consumption data can reveal much information about a household [3]. With many smart meters having remote power disconnection capabilities, an attack against the smart metering network can have serious consequences [5]. Today’s smart metering infrastructures rely on the Internet as its backbone network for data, making them vulnerable to the attacks possible on today’s Internet [6]. SCION [14], which stands for “Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-Generation Networks” is a secure next- generation Internet architecture that inherits the benefits of today’s Internet while addressing its limitations, especially in the case of security [7]. The path-aware networking capability of SCION provides high resilience against BGP hijacking, and its native multi-path feature provides a high availability and better protection against DDoS attacks. Moreover, SCION’s Dynamically Recreatable Key (DRKey) approach [15] pro- vides a fast and secure authentication mechanism. In this paper, we provide the design and implementation of a secure smart metering platform that uses the SCION network to overcome the vulnerabilities of today’s Internet. We developed a prototype of our platform based on real hardware, and performed an evaluation to show that our approach is able to achieve a high reliability without compromising on delay. To this end, our paper provides the following contributions: 1) Design of a smart metering platform using the SCION Internet architecture for communication 2) Implementation of a SCION based smart metering pro- totype 3) Evaluation of different methods based on the imple- mented prototype The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 delves into the current state of security in smart metering infrastructures and their vulnerabilities, the most relevant medium and protocols currently used in smart metering and the SCION Internet architecture. Section 3 presents the design of a smart metering platform using SCION, while Section 4 dis- cussed the implementation of a SCION-based smart metering prototype. Two alternative methods of using SCION in smart metering are evaluated using the prototype, and the results are compared in Section 5. Finally, the paper is concluded and the possible future works are discussed in Section 6. 978-3-903176-32-4 © 2021 IFIP