Question

Automatic meter reading. Electricity meters measure the amount of electricity usage in a household. With traditional meters, every month or so, an employee of the power company had to come and do a visual read of the meter, and report it back to the power company, so that the power company could invoice each customer properly. Because having a bunch of employees going house to house to read every single meter is not very effective, the power company has decided to replace all of the existing meters by fancier meters that are able to communicate with the power company over a network. The system works as follows: • The meter is a monotonically increasing counter C(t) that represents the number of kilowatts that have been used since the last reset of the meter. The counter is implemented as a 16-bit integer. • Every hour the system sends the current value C(t) back to the company. • Every month the company sends an invoice to the customer based on their prior month usage. • Meters are read-only, and can be considered as trusted. • The communication network used for communication between the meter and the company is a wireless (radio) network. Your threat model should account for protecting both customers and the power company. (The power company is deemed honest, and the meter itself is trusted.) Answer the following questions. Which security properties do you need to enforce and why (what is the consequence of lacking that property)?

          Automatic meter reading. Electricity meters measure the amount of electricity usage in a household. With traditional meters, every month or so, an employee of the power company had to come and do a visual read of the meter, and report it back to the power company, so that the power company could invoice each customer properly. Because having a bunch of employees going house to house to read every single meter is not very effective, the power company has decided to replace all of the existing meters by fancier meters that are able to communicate with the power company over a network. The system works as follows: • The meter is a monotonically increasing counter C(t) that represents the number of kilowatts that have been used since the last reset of the meter. The counter is implemented as a 16-bit integer. • Every hour the system sends the current value C(t) back to the company. • Every month the company sends an invoice to the customer based on their prior month usage. • Meters are read-only, and can be considered as trusted. • The communication network used for communication between the meter and the company is a wireless (radio) network. Your threat model should account for protecting both customers and the power company. (The power company is deemed honest, and the meter itself is trusted.) Answer the following questions. Which security properties do you need to enforce and why (what is the consequence of lacking that property)?

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