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Cloud-Centric Collaborative Security Service Placement for Advanced Metering Infrastructures

The extensive integration of smart meters to utility communication networks introduces numerous cyber security concerns. Such meters are the primary access points to a smart grid advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). They are physically unprotected devices that are geographically distributed in low-trust environments. Nonetheless, they are expected to transceive vital information regarding consumption, billing, and load management. The security of such information is an important requirement for operational continuity of a power system. Costs, system complexity, and response time are major considerations in designing security solutions for such cases. It is anticipated that future grids will be powered by the advancement of cloud computing. The security-as-a-service is a model that exploits the potential of cloud computing to provide cyber security solutions. Its key offerings include cost reduction, simplicity, and faster response. This paper proposes a cloud-centric collaborative security service architecture for the monitoring of upstream AMI traffic. It also includes a collaboration-aware service placement scheme for the proposed architecture. The placement scheme develops a quadratic assignment problem that minimizes latency. Case studies demonstrate the enhanced performance of the proposed scheme under various scenarios.