Research on smart meters has shown that fine-grained energy usage data poses privacy risks since it allows inferences about activities inside the home. While smart meter deployments are very limited, more than 40 million meters in the United States have been equipped with Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) technology over the past decades. AMR utilizes wireless communication for remotely collecting usage data from electricity, gas, and water meters. Yet to the best of our knowledge, AMR has so far received no attention from the security research community. In this paper, we conduct a security and privacy analysis of this technology. Based on our reverse engineering and experimentation, we find that the technology lacks basic security measures to ensure privacy, integrity, and authenticity of the data. Moreover, the AMR meters we examined continuously broadcast their energy usage data over insecure wireless links every 30s, even though these broadcasts can only be received when a truck from the utility company passes by. We show how this design allows any individual to monitor energy usage from hundreds of homes in a neighborhood with modest technical effort and how this data allows identifying unoccupied residences or people's routines. To cope with the issues, we recommend security remedies, including a solution based on defensive jamming that may be easier to deploy than upgrading the meters themselves.
['Ishtiaq Rouf', 'Hossen A. Mustafa', 'Miao Xu', 'Wenyuan Xu', 'Robert D. Miller', 'Marco Gruteser']
Neighborhood watch: security and privacy analysis of automatic meter reading systems