[Cryptography] Smart electricity meters can be dangerously insecure, warns expert

[Peter Gutmann]

Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> writes:

>Do smart meters have a remote shutdown capability?  I don't know. 

No.  They're built to be as cheap, compact, and low-power as possible.  All
they are is a minimal switchmode power supply powering an SoC with some power
sensing capabilities and a radio modem.  Adding heavy-duty power control
circuitry capable of switching, potentially, three-phase power, or at the
least several tens of amps (so thousands of kVA) of single-phase power, isn't
going to happen.

Peter.