Itron Inc. has released an enhanced security version of its OpenWay Collection Engine that enables strong authentication and enhanced security for use in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployments.
While the current version of OpenWay software is fully compliant with security and encryption to meet industry and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) C12.22 standards, the enhanced security version exceeds these requirements by providing industry leading security consistent with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) “Critical Cyber Asset” requirements, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) standards.
“The OpenWay architecture exceeds security requirements using proven industry algorithms to meet the networking demands for smart metering and the Smart Grid,” said Kip Gering, senior product line manager for OpenWay. “Enhanced by our partnership with Certicom, our solution is capable of handling secure message traffic and key management for 10 million meters, while the OpenWay CENTRON meter provides the computing power to process secured network messages in just milliseconds.”
Based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), Itron is using Certicom's AMI 7000 series of meter communication encryption and key management appliances in OpenWay to secure end-to-end network messages from the OpenWay Collection Engine down to end devices on the OpenWay system.
The security architecture inherent to OpenWay, combined with these enhanced signing and encryption capabilities, is designed to meet the two-way command and control needs for AMI and Smart Grid network platforms.
