The Implementation of an HSM-Based Smart Meter for Supporting DLMS/COSEM Security Suite 1

Abstract

To mitigate the impacts of climate change, many governments are making efforts to increase electricity generation from renewable sources. However, the massive amount of distributed energy resources (DER) involved introduces many challenges to electricity grid management. In the last decade, we have witnessed power grids gradually evolving to become smart grids with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The two-way nature of communication between smart meters and energy suppliers inevitably increases cyberattack surfaces for smart grids. As a result, cybersecurity problems associated with smart meters and smart grids are of great concern. The purpose of this paper is to develop a smart meter using a hardware security module (HSM) that supports the security mechanisms specified in Security Suite 1 of DLMS/COSEM. To the best of our knowledge, our smart meter prototype is the first published implementation using HSM. This also represents an important step in developing more secure IoT devices in general and smart meters in particular. Our implementation is based on the open-source project GuruX, available on GitHub. We revised the smart meter program GuruxDLMS.c to run on the Nuvoton M2354 hardware security module with the ability to invoke ECDSA, ECDH, and SHA-256 functions implemented on the HSM. The smart meter developed in this research 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).