Smart home cybersecurity considering the integration of renewable energy

Abstract

The smart home technology has attracted significant research interests recently. Despite this, such a technology is vulnerable to various security threats. A particularly important example is pricing cyberattack where hackers manipulate the guideline electricity pricing seen at the smart meters such that the electricity bills of hackers can be reduced and the local power system balance can be disturbed. This cybersecurity problem aggravates with the integration of renewable energy. The main reason is that renewable energy sources are associated with the inherent uncertainties. Since the total energy demand is equal to those requested from customers, it induces the uncertainties to the energy demand from the utility. The introduction of net metering technique that allows the customers to sell the excessively generated renewable energy back to the grid, further increases variations in energy supply. There are some technical advances in developing detection and defense frameworks against pricing cyberattacks. However, none of them considers the renewable energy integration or impact of net metering.In this book chapter, we will describe the impact of the integration of renewable energy and net metering technology on the smart home pricing cyberattack detection. Renewable energy and net metering change the grid energy demand, which is considered by the utility when designing the guideline price. If the cyberattack detection technique does not consider this, the detection performance would be degraded. This motivates us to develop a new smart home pricing cyberattack detection framework which handles the aforementioned impact into the detection. The simulation results demonstrate that our new framework can significantly improve the detection accuracy for about 30% compared to the state-of-art technique.