Cyber security of smart metering of electricity consumption in Finland

The cyber security position of Finnish smart metering was analysed in a research project together with key stakeholders. In this paper, the project and its results are presented. The stakeholders comprised the representatives of Distribution System Operators, and technology and service providers. The targets of analysis were their state-of-the-practice solutions existing in the field. Nearly all consumers already had smart meters, settlement based on real, hourly interval-metered consumption and access to their own consumption data via the Internet. The primary contributions of this paper are twofold. First, the findings of the analysis, i.e., the risks and the risk levels (occurrence frequencies and severities) as experienced by the stakeholders are given, together with recommendations for development targets, which may help in analysing other existing systems and developing security solutions for the systems under development. Second, the smart metering reference model is presented, which abstracts the various individual implementations at the level where systematic analysis is possible. The analysed Finnish smart metering systems are reasonably safe. The biggest threats were considered to be the leak of private customer data from the on-line access servers in the Internet and a large-scale failure in the remote software upgrade of the smart meter