We introduce a secure architecture called an attested meter for advanced metering that supports large-scale deployments, flexible configurations, and enhanced protection for consumer privacy and metering integrity. Our study starts with a threat analysis for advanced metering networks and formulates protection requirements for those threats. The attested meter satisfies these through a unified set of system interfaces based on virtual machines and attestation for the software agents of various parties that use the meter. We argue that this combination provides a well-adapted architecture for advanced metering and we take a step towards demonstrating its feasibility with a prototype implementation based on the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and Xen Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). This is the first effort use virtual machines and attestation in an advanced meter.
Michael LeMay, George Gross, Carl A. Gunter, Sanja