Securing Smart Metering Applications in Untrusted Clouds with the SecureCloud Platform

Data security in smart metering applications is important not only to secure the customer privacy but also to protect the power utility against fraud attempts. Usual deployment of metering applications rely on the power utility infrastructure, assuming its Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) as trustworthy. This paper describes the design and deployment of a smart metering system focusing on the security of the AMI (smart meters, data aggregator on the field, Metering Data Collection system and metering database) considering the data processing on untrusted clouds. We discuss one use case of the SecureCloud project, an ongoing project that investigates how security and privacy requirements of smart grid applications can be met with a secure cloud platform based on Intel SGX enclaves. The paper describes the components of the advanced metering system as well as the security approach adopted to meet its requirements. A smart metering application has been prototyped in the SecureCloud platform and the integration challenges are discussed from the perspectives of security, privacy and scalability.