Indeed - exactly the point I recently made - at least, in terms of 'getting at data' (including indications that a house might be unoccupied), the opportunities are already plentiful.
How about being able to provide the user with local display of units used - ideally broken down by price charged ? 'm sure everyone would be quite happy with a system where the data went off somewhere and there was no way to see the summary locally in the case of any "surprises"
I was, and it never occurred to me that it might be taken as a synonym for note.
Hmm
Doesn't have to be. IP isn't secure, TCP and UDP aren't secure - but (eg) IPSec VPNs are secure because although they're carried over the insecure IP protocol, the IPSec protocol has it's own encryption (or rather, to be more precise, uses layers of encryption).
Several scenarios have been postulated, all of them basically for the "because we can" mentality.
Well, for a start, you seem to be assuming that 'they' have designed the things with regard to the wishes, interests and convenience of consumers in mind - and I thought it was being suggested that such was the last thing in 'their' mind?!How about being able to provide the user with local display of units used - ideally broken down by price charged ? 'm sure everyone would be quite happy with a system where the data went off somewhere and there was no way to see the summary locally in the case of any "surprises"
As you will realise, it hadn't occurred to me, either, until I saw the response to it - and then I "bothered to think before I wrote" as a result of which thinking I responded to that response!
Quite - and as I said, I don't think anyone is disagreeing that 'down-link' needs a high level of security (as a result of which, the 'up-link' will presumably become very secure, too).
Indeed - that's what I was talking about.
Yes - but, as I said, unless by unbelievably lucky chance, the person who wishes to switch off his neighbour because of a party, washing machine or whatever is not going to be one of the extremely few who has the technical ability to even try to do that.
Is the system really that dumb/insecure - i.e. with meters 'blindly accepting instructions', provided only that those instructions are sent to the right address?
Yes, but especially given that this is (AIUI) a multi-national standard, they probably assumed correctly that they'd never get widespread public acceptance for a meter with no local readout with which the user could cross check the usage amounts appearing on their bills. Apart from that, not having a local display would preclude widespread installation without an already present and 100% relilable comms network.
Well we don't know the details of the security protocol - I don't know if it's been made public. If it's any good then making it public would not be a security risk - keeping it secret smacks of trying to do security by obscurity which has been demonstrated many times to not work.
Assuming it uses some sort of certificate based system, then that in itself has certain attack modes and managing certificates becomes a problem in itself. Should any certificate in the trust chain get compromised, then the door would be open to just about every meter in the country until they had been updated with new sets of trusted certificate data.It does - but it doesn't include some of the information available from BM Reports. On the Summary page there's some nice graphs, including a colour one showing the makeup of generation by fuel type over the last 24 hours - shows clearly that CCGT is doing most of the load following at the moment. What I can't find, and which was on the old site, is a graph showing forecast generation margin by week for the next 52 weeks - it was a useful graph showing how much spare capacity they expected to have available.
Premicells don't act as repeaters, but I see what you are saying - you can get a mobile signal across the Bristol Channel. There is a complication if you wanted to do a repeater function though ...
Whilst it's obviously true that, of all the devices we are talking about, a smart meter would be fairly unique in that one could not 'control' or switch it off, in practice many of them (e.g. mobile phones, routers, home automation systems etc. etc. - and many computers/tablets etc.) are nearly always left on, by people who generally don't know what is going on inside them. I therefore don't think that, in practice, smart meters represent any greater a risk than any of those other things..
As you will have seen, I was not really suggesting that consumers should/could be denied a local display. What I was saying is that consumers could be provided with adequate information (potentially much more than is available with non-smart meters) witrhout the need for multiple 'registers' in the meter.
Sure. However, I hope I am right in what I was saying - that, contrary to what you appeared to be suggesting, merely having a list of large number of "addresses" of meters should not allow one access to all those meters. At the very least I would hope that there would be some unique ID/password associated with each meter, which one would have to know in addition to the address.
That sounds pretty likely - but don't forget that one of the concerns is that countless millions of consumers will have their electricity charges remotely changed on an hour-by-hour (if not minute-by-minute) basis - e.g. in real-time response to changing demand. If the communications network could really support that, then almost anything is possioble!
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