Integrity protection in a smart grid environment for wireless access of smart meters

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 published security standards concerning a central communication unit for energy grids called Smart Meter Gateway (SMGW). The present security concept of the SPIDER project takes these standards into consideration but extends their level of information security by integrating elements from the Trusted Computing approach. Additionally, a tamper resistant grid is integrated with chosen hardware modules and a trustworthy boot process is applied. To continually measure the SMGW and smart meter (SM) integrity the approach Trusted Network Connect (TNC) from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is used. Hereby a Trusted Core Network (TCN) can be established to protect the smart grid components against IT based attacks. That is necessary, especially by the use of wireless connections between the SMGW and smart meter components.