Smart electricity meters can be dangerously insecure

Hackers can cause fraud, explosions and house fires, and utility companies should do more to protect consumers, conference told

January 01, 2017 11:18 pm | Updated 11:18 pm IST

Hackers could well control all smart devices connected to the electricity meter.

Hackers could well control all smart devices connected to the electricity meter.

Smart electricity meters, of which there are more than 100 million installed around the world, are frequently “dangerously insecure,” a security expert has said.

The lack of security in the smart utilities raises the prospect of a single line of malicious code cutting power to a home or even causing a catastrophic overload leading to exploding meters or house fires, according to Netanel Rubin, co-founder of the security firm Vaultra.

“Reclaim your home,” Mr. Rubin told hackers and security experts, “or someone else will.” If a hacker took control of a smart meter, they would be able to know “exactly when and how much electricity you’re using,” Mr. Rubin told the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. An attacker could also see if a home had any expensive electronics.

“He can do billing fraud, setting your bill to whatever he likes ... The scary thing is if you think about the power they have over your electricity. He will have power over all of your smart devices connected to the electricity. This will have more severe consequences: imagine you woke up to find you’d been robbed by a burglar who didn’t have to break in.

“But even if you don’t have smart devices, you are still at risk. An attacker who controls the meter also controls the meter’s software, allowing him to cause it to literally explode.” Mr. Rubin said many of the warnings were not hypothetical.

In 2009 Puerto Rican smart meters were hacked en masse , leading to widespread billing fraud, and in 2015 a house fire in Ontario was traced back to a faulty smart meter, although hacking was not implicated in that.

Outdated protocols

The problems at the heart of the insecurity stem from outdated protocols, half-hearted implementations and weak design principles.

While the physical security of smart meters is strong — “trust me, I tried” to hack in that way, Mr. Rubin said — the wireless protocols many of them use are problematic.

To communicate with the utility company, most smart meters use GSM, the 2G mobile standard. That has a fairly well-known weakness whereby an attacker with a fake mobile tower can cause devices to “hand over” to the fake version from the real tower, simply by providing a strong signal. In GSM, devices have to authenticate with towers, but not the other way round, allowing the fake mast to send its own commands to the meter.

Worse still, said Mr. Rubin, all the meters from one utility used the same hard-coded credentials. “If an attacker gains access to one meter, it gains access to them all. It is the one key to rule them all.” Inside the home, too, the communications are rendered insecure by outdated standards and bad implementation.

Almost all smart meters use the Zigbee standard to speak to other smart devices in the home. Zigbee, which dates from 2003, is a home automation standard, used for controlling everything from lightbulbs to air conditioners. But it is so convoluted, due to the vast array of devices supported, that it is almost better to think of it as 15 different standards, each of which vendors can choose to implement as they see fit.

“This unique situation is so difficult to implement, vendors actually choose what they want to implement. And when they choose what to support, they more often than not skip security,” Mr. Rubin said. — The Guardian

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