A Consumption Authenticator Based Mechanism for Time-of-Use Smart Meter Measurements Verification

Energy meters have become smart and functionally powerful over time. Still many concerns about the correctness of their behavior are raised by society and the effort involved on new smart meters type approval are growing huge. Aiming at establishing trust on the smart meter, this paper proposes a consumption authenticator which can be read from the meter's display and verifiable by the user. This authenticator is generated inside a secure device, placed on the metering module, using ECPVS signature scheme providing partial message recovery. Since our approach considers different Time-Of-Use scenarios, a composing technique for the authenticator's embedded message is presented. Our concerns are the necessary data for validating Time-Of-Use rates measurement values and the final size of the message.