Architecture and Development of Secure Communication
Solutions for Smart Grid Applications
Axel Sikora
University of Applied Sciences Offenburg, D77652 Offenburg, Germany
Email: axel.sikora@hs-offenburg.de
Abstract—The communication technologies for automatic me-
ter reading (smart metering) and for energy production and
distribution networks (smart grid) have the potential to be one
of the first really highly scaled machine-to-machine-(M2M)-
applications. During the last years two very promising devel-
opments around the wireless part of smart grid communication
were initialized, which possibly have an impact on the markets
far beyond Europe and far beyond energy automation.
Besides the specifications of the Open Metering System (OMS)
Group, the German Federal Office for Information Security
(Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI) has
designed a protection profile (PP) and a technical directive (TR)
for the communication unit of an intelligent measurement sys-
tem (smart meter gateway), which were released in March 2013.
This design uses state-of-the-art technologies and prescribes
their implementation in real-life systems.
At first sight the expenditures for the prescribed solutions seem
to be significant. But in the long run, this path is inevitable and
comes with strategic advantages.
Index Terms—BSI protection profile, secure smart meter gate-
way, PKI
I. INTRODUCTION
Communication technologies are a major stepping
stone for the upcoming application fields like smart me-
tering and smart grid. They allow the timely observability
and controllability of distributed elements in the genera-
tion, the distribution and the consumer networks. Due to
the strong dependency, the robustness of a smart grid
communication network against attack is of the utmost
importance for the deployment of the smart grid [1] The
security of these communication solutions is a central
precondition for their successful application, as
The functional safety of a system can be achieved
only, if the security is guaranteed. This holds true
both for the functional aspects of energy generation
and consumption control as for the financial aspects
of the smart energy market.
Customers and companies alike will ask for privacy.
However, security is a significant challenge for smart
meter networks, as
Manuscript received June 10, 2013; revised August 17, 2013.
This work was supported in part by a grant from German Federal
Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi) ZIM KF2471305ED2.
Corresponding author email: axel.sikora@hs-offenburg.de.
A significant part of the communication paths will be
wireless, so that there is no possibility for a physical
protection of these paths.
The local metrological networks (LMN) between the
sensors (meters) and the data collectors (gateways)
provide only limited capacity with regard to band-
width and frame size.
Many of the network elements are based on relatively
small and low-cost embedded systems with only lim-
ited computing and memory resources.
The systems envisage an extended time of operation.
Even though individual elements, like meters, will be
replaced after five to ten years, the overall communi-
cation architecture should be operated at least 15 to 20
years.
This contribution gives a short overview on the state of
the art with regard to security approaches for smart grid
communications (Section II), then presents the proposals
of the smart meter gateway protection profile (Section
III), and discusses some important implementation issues
(Section IV). It shows a cost benefit analysis in Section V,
before making some conclusion and outlook.
II. STATE OF THE ART
Worldwide, a lot of activities are ongoing to investi-
gate on the solutions for secure smart grid operations.
This includes
A plethora of theoretical analyses and proposals, as
they are summarized in excellent survey papers like [1]
[2]or in the online bibliography [3],
Generic standardization efforts like from the US-
based NIST [4] or the Europe-based CEN-
CENELEC-ETSI Smart Grid Coordination Group [5],
Development of protocols and solutions for specific
parts of the smart grid communication network, like
IEC62351 [6]to be used over IEC61850, ZigBee
Smart Energy Profile [7] or the specification from
Wireless M-Bus EN13757 and Open Metering Sys-
tem (OMS) Group [8], [9].
In this charivari of activities, the German Federal Of-
fice for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit
in der Informationstechnik, BSI) was mandated by its
governing ministry to design a protection profile (PP) and
a technical directive (TR) for the communication unit of
an intelligent measurement system (smart meter gateway
PP) [10] and for the security module of a smart metering
490
of Communications Vol. 8, No. 8, August 2013
doi:10.12720/jcm.8.8.490-496
©2013 Engineering and Technology Publishing