Deployment considerations for intrusion detection systems in advanced metering infrastructure

Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMIs) enable advanced bidirectional communication between utilities and smart meters deployed in the field, allowing consumption, outage, and price information to be shared efficiently and reliably. The addition of this new infrastructure, connected through mesh networks, has given rise to new opportunities for adversaries to interfere with communications and possibly compromise utilities' assets or steal customers' private information. The goal of this thesis is to survey the various threats facing AMIs in order to identify and understand the requirements for a comprehensive intrusion detection solution. The threat analysis leads to an extensive set of failure scenarios that captures the attackers' key objectives and is used to extract the information required to effectively detect attacks. Using the information taken from the failure scenarios and knowledge of how encrypted communications can affect detection reliability, we explore possible intrusion detection system (IDS) infrastructures and discuss deployment considerations for each of them, paying particular attention to how well they can detect attacks. We also suggest that the widest coverage of monitoring for attacks can be provided by a hybrid sensing infrastructure that uses both a centralized intrusion detection system and embedded meter or dedicated standalone sensors