Systematic survey of advanced metering infrastructure security: Vulnerabilities, attacks, countermeasures, and future vision

There is a paradigm shift from traditional power distribution systems to smart grids (SGs) due to advances in information and communication technology. An advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is one of the main components in an SG. Its relevance comes from its ability to collect, process, and transfer data through the internet. Although the advances in AMI and SG techniques have brought new operational benefits, they introduce new security and privacy challenges. Security has emerged as an imperative requirement to protect an AMI from attack. Currently, ensuring security is a major challenge in the design and deployment of an AMI. This study provides a systematic survey of the security of AMI systems from diverse perspectives. It focuses on attacks, mitigation approaches, and future visions. The contributions of this article are fourfold: First, the vulnerabilities that may exist in all components of an AMI are described and analyzed. Second, it considers attacks that exploit these vulnerabilities and the impact they can have on the performance of individual components and the overall AMI system. Third, it discusses various countermeasures that can protect an AMI system. Fourth, it presents the open challenges relating to AMI security as well as future research directions. The uniqueness of this review is its comprehensive coverage of AMI components with respect to their security vulnerabilities, attacks, and countermeasures. The future vision is described at the end. •In-depth exploration and analysis of the state-of-the-art have been conducted.•Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and its components have been covered.•Security vulnerabilities, attacks, and countermeasures for AMI have been analyzed.•Lessons learned, current challenges, and future vision for AMI security have been discussed.