Victoria's (not so) smart electricity meters

David Heath
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 09:19

Business IT - Security

Returning to the announcement links on the first page, it would seem not.

Quoting from the AustralianIT story, Accenture Australia intelligent networks senior executive Ann Burns said "the programs were made up of three things: first, buying and deploy the meters; second, setting up the network and communications so there was two-way communication between the meters and the systems.  The third component was the back-end systems.

"This really does change your relationship with the customer," Ms Burns said. "You can sell different products and services, which is a great way for them to reinvent themselves."

No mention of security.

Other observers (here for instance) have noted that there is a distinct possibility that hackers could easily take control of thousands of smart meters; switching supply on or off, choking supply, detecting whether people are home or are possibly on vacation (by reading consumption levels) etc.

Much of the research has come from IOActive who purchased and examined a wide range of meters from various manufacturers.  Unfortunately, according to today's announcement, they all suffer from similar ills.  Susceptibility to buffer overflow and other such 'newbie' errors.

"Many of the security vulnerabilities we found are pretty frightening and most smart meters don't even use encryption or ask for authentication before carrying out sensitive functions like running software updates and severing customers from the power grid," Mike Davis, IOActive's Senior Security Consultant reported. "We hope that by informing people that these serious vulnerabilities exist, it will prompt vendors to mitigate existing vulnerabilities and increase security in future products."

Right now, I'm not sure I want to be in any hurry to get one of these.  Sure a potential thief could wander past my house to look at my meter every day to decide whether I'm away, but that's rather obvious.  If it can be done from afar (and he has the power to do other nasty things) I'm rather concerned. 

Comment is being sought from the Minister's office.