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By-design vulnerabilities in the ANSI C12.22 protocol specification

The ANSI C12.22 is a standard that specifies interfaces to data communication networks in the smart grid. In this paper we discuss several vulnerabilities by design that we discovered in the ANSI C12.22 protocol specification during an analysis of the overall protocol architecture. The consequences of an exploitation of those vulnerabilities consist of denial of service conditions and disruptions to ANSI C12.22 nodes and relays. We developed attack code to experiment with exploitations of most of the vulnerabilities that we discuss in this paper. Our research testbed consisted of meters that we emulated via the Trilliant TstBench software. The emulated meters were running on virtual Windows machines on a virtual network. In the paper, we provide details of the vulnerabilities by design that we identified, and thus propose a series of revisions of the ANSI C12.22 protocol specification with the objective of mitigating those vulnerabilities.