Development Of Water Meter For Secure Communication In The Advanced Metering Infrastructure

The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the integral components of the smart water grid where water consumption data is collected, stored, and transferred to the utility Meter Data Management System (MDMS). The organizations which are directly involved in promoting and developing the Smart Water Grid have tried to figure out the operating scenarios in the overall domain from the smart meters up to MDMS, and logical/physical components that should be expected to exist to perform those operations in the full extent. One of the daunting tasks in realizing the services in the AMI is the security issue. Unlike the utility operation system which is almost isolated from the outside world from the communication point of view, the AMI will lie in the open domain. Since water metering devices are located in an open network domain, any cyber attack that is excruciating the services of the Internet could take a toll on the services in the Smart Water Grid at the same level. In order to understand cyber security threats and define security requirements we explain the logical model of the AMI, and then based on the logical model we analyze the information flows to provide the advanced services in this domain. Based on the characteristics of devices that consist of the customer domain and the information flows for providing advanced services, we analyze the possible security attacks which exploit the vulnerability of devices and information flows. Next we address the implementation issue of the water meter. We propose possible approaches for developing the smart water meter in which the security functions should be integrated into metering and communication functions in the same box in economic and efficient ways