Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

The power meters at our houses are not simple technology. In fact, they create an extremely large mesh network that eventually communicates with power company routers. This project is all about reverse engineering these power meters and understanding how they work. I'll include my personal notes for this technology in this thread.

The protocol can be seen at Recessim. The meter data includes the packet types, WAN address, counter, LAN address, date/time, checksum and other information. This is constantly being sent out from our power meters. This is an amazing resource for understanding how the protocol works.

Some other researchers built a GnuRadio build for this as well. This allows for the reading of the data in a nice readable format! If you wanted, you can probably send these out as well but this is likely illegal.

The wiki page has pictures of several different meters as well. There is a chain of videos about the smart meters. From hardware modifications to reduce the power to protocol analysis. Overall, lots of great resource for protocol reverse engineering, hardware hacking and SDR.

To reduce the power of the meter, the author in the video gets the datasheet to understand what is going on. By grounding one of the wires on the main RF module, the power amplifier is turned off. This took a few tries to do properly but the hacker did not give up! This strategy works but a more powerful Faraday would have worked as well.

The power company can remotely turn off the power of your house. Once this has been triggered, a hardware switch is triggered that opens up the connection to prevent the power from coming in. It may be possible to just break this switch and prevent the ability to remotely turn off the power.