Cyber Hygiene in Smart Metering Systems

Abstract

One of the fundamental components of smart cities is the smart grid characterized by various information and operational technologies that guarantee reliable and clean energy supply. For this reason, they are a fundamental pillar for achieving sustainability in the world in which we live. Despite the enormous advantages of the smart grid, it has quite a few challenges; one that has been fundamental in recent years is cybersecurity. The traditional approach to address cybersecurity issues generally does not consider the human factor as the main component. Recently, the concept of cyber hygiene has emerged, where the social and human aspect are fundamental since in the same similarity with traditional hygiene, the fact of carrying out personal care practices can contribute to improving people's health, in this sense, having better personal cybersecurity practices will allow for better cybersecurity performance of systems. This work shows the implementation of cyber hygiene in the context of smart grid, showing a methodology to carry it out and applying it in the context of smart metering systems. The results show that the proposed method can successfully be used in the smart grid and can be applied to other contexts.