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

[Arnold Reinhold]

> On Jan 3, 2017, at 10:44 PM, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:
> 
>> How much would it add to the cost of an electric meter to employ an SoC with enough power to implement the security standards? A dollar? Two? That cost would presumably be recovered from the rate payer over the life of the meter, a few cents a month. 
> I'm not sure that cost is the driving factor here.  What seems to be more relevant is that power companies are simply unfamiliar with modern computing technology.  They have a long-standing, very sophisticated understanding of high-power systems, which are basically electromechanical.  When you unit of power is the megawatt, very few semiconductor - much less IC - parts are relevant.  It took years to build workable rectifier stacks.

[Nice description of mechanical power line recloser breakers elided]

> Sounds absurdly complex - but the engineering of such systems has a long, successful history.  It integrates easily with the switches needed to actually cut and restore multi-KV, multi-megawatt power lines.  (These switch are typically bathed in oil for insulation anyway.  A system like this is very rugged, unfazed by electrical surges.  Building and certifying a microprocessor-controlled equivalent to serve out on top of a power pole, unattended, for many years, is not an easy task.

Late last century I had a gig at Foxboro Corporation, a well-respected manufacturer of industrial instrumentation and control systems. The stuff I was working on was electronic and computer based, but they had been in business since 1908 and had developed many intricate, mechanical and pneumatic sensors and control systems, which they still supported. After the Iran-Iraq war, Foxboro got a flood or orders for the older, non-electronic devices from refineries and chemical plants in the Middle East because they had proved more resilient in war time than the newer electronic systems. We need to heed that lesson in the context of cyberwar.

More to the point, however:

> 
> So ... I think the power guys are just out of their depths here.  It'll take a while for them to develop the necessary expertise to integrate modern processors properly.
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One skill essential to any good engineer is knowing when you are out of your depth and finding engineering resources with the necessary skills. So in this regard the power guys are likely in better shape than the vast majority of commercial, government and non-profit enterprises, who have few if any traditional engineers on the payroll, and probably none in management. (I’m not counting the IT department, which every enterprise has.) The problem I see is where does our power engineer go to to get reliable advice on a security design? There is so much snake-oil security out there. Vendors have their products to sell, right or wrong, government security agencies want to protect their offensive capabilities, standards bodies are not specialized in computer security and treat it as one more chapter in stove-piped specs. Who would you recommend?

Arnold Reinhold