Most of the smart meters deployed so far support
the security mechanisms in Security Suite 0,
including Advanced Encryption Standard-
Galois/Counter Mode-128 (AES-GCM-128) for
authenticated encryption and AES-128 key wrap for
key transport. This is evidenced by the majority of
smart meter products certified by DLMS UA being
Security Suite 0 compliant. Even though
authentication can be done using GMAC in Security
Suite 0, the increasing demand for communicating
with smart meters to ensure secure and efficient
energy management requires stronger authentication
mechanisms such as ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital
Signature Algorithm), ECDH (Elliptic Curve Diffie–
Hellman key exchange), and SHA (Secure Hash
Algorithm); these are defined in Security Suite 1.
In this paper, we develop a smart meter using a
hardware security module (HSM) that supports the
security mechanisms specified in Security Suite 1.
The smart meter developed in this research is based
on the open-source software GuruxDLMS.c (GuruX,
2022) with several modifications to enable it to run
on the Nuvoton M2354 hardware security module
(HSM); it is also tested for the implementations of
ECDSA with P-256, ECDH with P-256, and SHA-
256 using Conformance Test Tool version 3.1 (CTT
v3.1).
The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II discusses related work on smart meters and
smart grids as well as their security issues. Section III
describes the testbed and test tool for our research.
Section IV provides more detail on how
GuruxDLMS.c was modified for invoking ECDSA,
ECDH, and SHA-256 functions implemented on the
Nuvoton M2354 HSM. Section V concludes our
research results.
2 RELATED WORK
A smart grid with large-scale integration of DER will
increase cyberattack surfaces. Qi et al. (2016) discuss
the cybersecurity issues of integrated DER and
propose a holistic attack-resilient framework to
protect the power grid. They also identify some
important attack scenarios against DER and suggest
that more research is needed to explore how trusted
platform modules (TPMs) and trusted execution
environments (TEEs) can be used in DER devices.
As a standard language for smart devices,
DLMS/COSEM specifies a data model, an
application-layer protocol, and media-specific
communication profiles for smart metering and
control across electricity, gas, heat energy, water, and
so on (DLMS User Association, 2022b). The
specifications for DLMS/COSEM are found in two
colored books, the so-called Blue Book and Green
Book. The COSEM object-oriented data model and
the object identification system (OBIS) are specified
in the Blue Book, whereas the application layer, the
lower layers, and the communication profiles are
specified in the Green Book. The latest versions of the
two books are Edition 14 for the Blue Book and
Edition 10 for the Green Book. The information
security features are defined in the Green Book.
Over 1500 DLMS-certified meter types are
currently used in more than 60 countries. We
therefore review several research results that pinpoint
the potential vulnerabilities in DLMS/COSEM
specifications.
Dantas et al. (2014) in an early paper, developed
an automated tool called eFuzz for security
assessments of DLMS/COSEM smart meters. The
security analysis is based on the specifications in the
DLMS/COSEM Green Book (Edition 7), in which
AES is the primary authenticated encryption
algorithm. Their experiments showed that eFuzz is an
effective tool for security inspections for smart
meters.
Mendes et al. (2018) developed an open-source
tool called ValiDLMS for validating and auditing
security of DLMS/COSEM implementations using
power-line communication. ValiDLMS consists of
three layers: the DLMS/COSEM environment,
interaction, and testing. The security analysis was
performed by employing fuzzing techniques and
vulnerability tests. Their experiments found security
flaws in the Low-Level Security (LLS)
implementation of the smart meter provided by their
industrial partner.
Luring et al. (2018) performed by-hand analyses
on security aspects of the Green Book (Edition 8).
They identified several vulnerabilities and suggested
some effective countermeasures. In the COSEM data
model, a smart meter acts as the server, and any
application acting as the client that needs to access the
smart meter should first establish an application
association (AA). Authentication is therefore very
important in the AA process. DLMS/COSEM defines
three security levels for authentication, namely No
Security, Low-Level Security (LLS), and High Level
Security (HLS). In HLS, five methods are provided:
MD1, SHA1, GMAC, SHA2, and ECDSA. The
authors in (Luring et al., 2018) suggested that
ECDSA provides the most secure authentication out
of these methods.
The widespread use of IoT devices raises great
concerns about cyber threats to resource-constrained