Abstract
In the electric energy metering process, current and voltage are sampled periodically and simultaneously, and then used to calculate the energy consumption. This paper presents a simple yet powerful attack to the above metering mechanism such that the calculated energy consumption is made far away from the actual one. Specifically, an adversary switches on/off the power circuit at the meter's sampling rate. If the meter samples the circuit at the circuit-off (or circuit-on) time, the measured energy consumption is much lower (or higher respectively) than the actual one. Unlike the state-of-the-art false load injection attacks, the present attack is immune to the well-known cryptographical countermeasure that builds a secure and time-stamped channel between the meter and the central system. We implemented a low-cost device to attack a simulated electric energy meter. According to the experiment results, the attack method is effective. Moreover, we propose a countermeasure on the present attack and demonstrate its effectiveness.