Hardware Trojan Based Security Issues in Home Area Network: A Testbed Setup

Hawzhin Mohammed, Jimmy Howell, Syed Rafay Hasan, Nan Guo, Faiq Khalid, Omar S. Elkeelany

Abstract: Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is the main player in todays Smart Grid, and Home Area Network (HAN) is an important subsystem in AMI. HAN connects the smart home appliances (SHA) inside the home to the smart meter (SM), which is connected to the power utility company. In the last decade, hardware Trojans (HT), have been extensively studied in both academia and industry. Consequently, the vulnerability of integrated circuits (ICs) against HTs leads to the potential security threat to any system that contains ICs, and HAN is no exception. However, to the best of authors knowledge, the potential effect of HTs on HAN has not been studied in the literature so far. In this paper, we are investigating HT in HAN network. In the process, we developed a testbed which can be scalable up to 127 nodes using I2C interface to control and implement any kind of required network behavior. We introduced three possible scenarios of HTs in this HAN network testbed. These scenarios illustrate the manifestation of HTs in the HAN that leads to network performance degradation.