Towards self-protecting smart metering: investigating requirements for the MAPE loop

Abstract

Smart grids are increasingly proliferating all over the world to leverage electricity infrastructures with information technology. Smart metering, particularly Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), is an enabling technology for realizing smart grids by collecting and processing energy consumption logs and managing energy for customers and utility companies. Security is one of the main concerns of smart metering, and potential threats and attacks to this technology have been discussed since the early initiatives. Considering the unbounded and changing nature of security problems, especially in complex and critical cyber-physical systems, smart metering security concerns can not be always addressed at design time. Autonomic self-protection promises to address runtime security concerns in proactive and reactive ways. In this paper, we focus on the customer domain of smart metering, and investigate potential reactive self-protection scenarios by concentrating on requirements. To this aim, we analyze a sample set of published security requirements from the AMISEC forum [1] to derive self-protection requirements. Then we discuss how these requirements can be linked to the MAPE loop [2] in the autonomic computing architecture.