GRCon21 - Reverse Engineering Smart Meters

Presented by Hash Salehi at GNU Radio Conference 2021 As the Internet of Things proliferates we are finding more and more devices connected to the internet, often by wireless connectivity, in more and more areas. One such area is Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) which refers to systems that measure, collect, and analyze energy usage, and communicate with metering devices such as electricity meters, gas meters, heat meters, and water meters, either on request or on a schedule. The convenience of connectivity is undeniable, but proprietary protocols also have security implications. This presentation will discuss the hardware and software reverse engineering of a widely deployed AMI system, and show how GNU Radio is an integral component. A realtime application capable of decoding and processing information from these IoT devices, as well as some interesting results from real world data collection from a major metropolitan area will be presented. The GNU Radio receiver will be available to the public on GitHub.