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Smart Electricity Meters Can Be Dangerously Insecure, Warns Expert (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Smart electricity meters, of which there are more than 100 million installed around the world, are frequently "dangerously insecure," a security expert has said. The lack of security in the smart utilities raises the prospect of a single line of malicious code cutting power to a home or even causing a catastrophic overload leading to exploding meters or house fires, according to Netanel Rubin, co-founder of the security firm Vaultra. If a hacker took control of a smart meter they would be able to know "exactly when and how much electricity you're using," Rubin told the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. An attacker could also see whether a home had any expensive electronics. "He can do billing fraud, setting your bill to whatever he likes [...] The scary thing is if you think about the power they have over your electricity. He will have power over all of your smart devices connected to the electricity. This will have more severe consequences: imagine you woke up to find you'd been robbed by a burglar who didn't have to break in. "But even if you don't have smart devices, you are still at risk. An attacker who controls the meter also controls the meter's software, allowing him to cause it to literally explode." The problems at the heart of the insecurity stem from outdated protocols, half-hearted implementations and weak design principles. To communicate with the utility company, most smart meters use GSM, the 2G mobile standard. That has a fairly well-known weakness whereby an attacker with a fake mobile tower can cause devices to "hand over" to the fake version from the real tower, simply by providing a strong signal. In GSM, devices have to authenticate with towers, but not the other way round, allowing the fake mast to send its own commands to the meter. Worse still, said Rubin, all the meters from one utility used the same hardcoded credentials. "If an attacker gains access to one meter, it gains access to them all. It is the one key to rule them all."
When "smart" meters first hit the scene a few years ago, people brought up these very issues. I'm surprised that in that time they have not been addressed, though I know I shouldn't be surprised...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
How on earth is software going to make a meter explode?
So, a house fire traced back to a faulty meter means that they can be 'hacked to literally explode'. Excellent extrapolation there guys.
Smart meters may - or may not - have a relay to control loads on a different tariff than the usual "always on 24/7" one. They may possibly be hacked to turn this relay on - or off, making them a bit of a nuisance.
But explosions? Or house fires even? A bit hard to believe.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
An attacker could also see whether a home had any expensive electronics.
He will have power over all of your smart devices connected to the electricity.
An attacker who controls the meter also controls the meter's software, allowing him to cause it to literally explode.
How did this kind of chicken-little the-sky-is-falling FUD make its way onto Slashdot?
You should be ashamed for posting this "article".
Insecurity of these devices is not something the language used to program can fix. Whether it's in Rust or in C, you can write very insecure code on any platform, Rust just tries to prevent common mistakes in C so buffer overflows are 'caught', Java or Objective C has similar safeguards as Rust resulting in similar problems.
Both Perl and Ruby have very strict tainted variable constructs for example, it's almost impossible to not clean the data received from outside the program but that doesn't make your code invincible to SQL injection.
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Thank you, Im an electrician by trade. I have had people ask me to do crazy shit.. like in tower work they want a wire going from one wall in a room to another wall in a room, the floor and ceiling is concrete. Ofcourse they dont want you to cut holes though. i have actually told customers i didnt like much, "Im an electrician not a magician" and that cant be done with out damage. i was reading the summary and wondered how in the world it could cause the meter to explode, and i cant figure out what kindof hardware setup inside could make it explode. Now on the other hand, if each leg of power has a separate contact switch, and they are controlled separately you could in theory kill alot of the electronics in a home and set ones that dont have protection on fire if they can disconnect the neutral wire only and leave the power legs on. But in most meterpanels the neutral wire is put onto a busbar that does not disconnect. or the other way would be to turn one of the legs of power off and hope for the worst, which would only effect 220V+ equipment(electric stove or oven, air-conditioner) and even then it would depend on how the device was built.
is a load of crap. These are state machines, typically written in embedded C. There are typically current transformers that have a large winding ratio, even if the electronics/firmware screws up there is no back driving the power line. And no relays. This guy has been watching too much Hollywood.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
If this is so simple, and it's been an issue for years, then why not even one single proof of concept. Nobody wants to control their power bill? ISIS just waiting for the right time to kill us all? In terms of credibility this is right up there with "Hackers can turn your home computer into a BOMB... & blow your family to smithereens!".
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
These devices have issues on a MUCH "higher level", SQL injections are the least of their issues. GMS, grid-wide passwords...I'm assuming no encryption at all for the signals. It looks like one doesn't even need to get into any code-specific exploits...just a 2G GSM transmitter and some protocals, and maybe a list of commands. Pull up next to someone's house, hijack the signal and probably get the meter itself to just explode.
If properly exploited, this will be a "virtual" WMD in WWIII. A bit of code, replicated out across the tower network, once triggered could potentially start millions of simultaneous house fires across the USA, and knock out most urban power grids. A few minutes later, trigger other code at the power plants to do something similar. Like a STUXNET but aimed at the electrical grid and smart meters.
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No. Just no. Look them up, at most what they have is remote disconnect relays with a cycle time of 30 to 120 seconds. The aren't solenoids (wire coil relays) but stall motors that move the contanctor open or closed and are not fast acting. That is their only active function. The rest are passive. So they might be able to fiddle the bill, or turn your power on and off. But make the meter explode? I've not seen any designs that would fail in that way. Admittedly, I've not seen every design, but most use a stall motor to move a spring loaded armature/contactor set open or closed.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I get that there are a lot of AMI meters out there that were installed with the old 2G protocol and should be upgraded, which probably means a meter by meter physical upgrade (though perhaps additional encryption software running over 2G could be installed in firmware, which could also take care of hard coded passwords).
But more modern meters are using 3G or 4G, and overall security has been upgraded. The article only covers the older installs without saying that more modern meters and software have addressed the security concerns outlined in the article.
these devices allow remote monitoring of power usage with granularity of a day or better. How hard would it be for a power company sys-admin, who is a little short of cash, to write a script to find customers who's usage had dropped by 50% or more since a few days ago ? Then sell that list to his house burglar friend who would like to know about homes who's owners might be away on holiday.
It's more sensible than French, where everything is either a he or a she, even if it doesn't have any gonads.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The male gender is the default generic in English and has been so for a couple of hundred years or so. Unless you are going for fringe edge sociological theory and claiming dozens of gender pronouns; "he" is correct generic singular pronoun in formal English.
NRRPT/RCT