A Threat Analysis Methodology for Smart Home Scenarios

A smart grid is envisioned to enable a more economic, environmental friendly, sustainable and reliable supply of energy. But significant security concerns have to be addressed for the smart grid, dangers range from threatened availability of energy, to threats of customer privacy. This work focuses on a specific part of the Smart Grid: the analysis of a smart home environment, the identification of different attackers, vulnerabilities, and threats. The presented method follows Microsoft’s security development lifecycle (abbreviated: ”SDL”), which is regarded as mandatory for some energy sector related vendors. This work contributes a structured method to identify threats that are missing in Smart Grid research. New alternatives, e.g., for scenario definition and asset identification based on context-patterns are introduced, which tackle the SDL’s textual approach and its lack of scalability. Research is based on the smart home scenario provided by the industrial partners of the NESSoS project.