Reconciling security protection and monitoring requirements in Advanced Metering Infrastructures

Making Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMIs) resilient to availability and privacy compromises is an important aspect of grid reliability and consumer trust. Lessons learned from traditional cyber systems indicate that achieving resiliency requires the joint deployment of strong protective measures on the one hand, and monitoring and response mechanisms on the other. One major challenge in this endeavor is that of finding the sweet spot between the confidentiality requirements for protecting sensitive AMI traffic through encryption, and the monitoring necessary for full inspection of this traffic. The way to reconcile those conflicting requirements needs to be considered carefully. We review current approaches for protecting and monitoring AMIs and discuss a number of solutions for their productive co-existence.