Security concept for gateway integrity protection within German smart grids

Abstract

In order to meet future challenges of energy grids, secure communication between involved control systems is necessary. Therefore, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has been published security standards concerning a secure communication unit for smart metering systems, which is named Smart Meter Gateway (SMGW). This present security concept of this paper takes these standards into consideration, but extends their level of information security by integrating elements from the Trusted Computing approach. A tamper-resistant grid has been integrated with chosen hardware modules and a trustworthy boot process has been applied. To measure and evaluate the SMGW’s integrity continuously the specification Trusted Network Connect (TNC) from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has been used furthermore. This work is an outcome of the German research project SPIDER from BMWi, which started in March 2013 and will end in February 2015.