Mitigating Selective Jamming Attacks in Smart Meter Data Collection Using Moving Target Defense

In Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks, power data collections from smart meters are static. Due to such static nature, attackers may predict the transmission behavior of the smart meters which can be used to launch selective jamming attacks that can block the transmissions. To avoid such attack scenarios and increase the resilience of the AMI networks, in this paper, we propose dynamic data reporting schedules for smart meters based on the idea of moving target defense (MTD) paradigm. The idea behind MTD-based schedules is to randomize the transmission times so that the attackers will not be able to guess these schedules. Specifically, we assign a time slot for each smart meter and in each round we shuffle the slots with Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm that has been shown to provide secure randomness. We also take into account the periodicity of the data transmissions that may be needed by the utility company. With the proposed approach, a smart meter is guaranteed to send its data at a different time slot in each round. We implemented the proposed approach in ns-3 using IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh standard as the communication infrastructure. Simulation results showed that our protocol can secure the network from the selective jamming attacks without sacrificing performance by providing similar or even better performance for collection time, packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay compared to previously proposed protocols.