CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

Electricity is very crucial to the socio-economic and technological development of every country. One of the indices used to measure the development of an economy is uninterrupted power supply. It is widely accepted that there is a strong correlation between the availability of electricity and socio-economic development. The supply of electricity in Nigeria incurs substantial capital. The enormity of these costs is growing astronomically across the globe. To decipher the unlawful users of electricity in a bid to enhance the economy of utility company, efficiency and protection of the grid, a novel procedure for scrutinizing electricity usage patterns of customers and recognizing illegal consumers is proposed and implemented. Nigeria electric power network operator, electricity Distribution Companies of Nigeria (DISCOs) has for a long period of time been combating the problem of revenue collation. This is majorly attributed to the fact that electricity bills are sent to consumers after consumption. Consumers are usually unwilling to pay electricity bills as a result of epileptic nature of the electricity supplied which is not usually mirrored in the bills which are basically estimates of power usage and not usually commensurate to the true amount of electricity consumed by the respective consumer.

The low reliability of electric power supply has little bearing on the network operator because whether power is provided or not, in the post-paid method, the monthly electricity bills are still sent to consumers. Hence, the user bears the cost of generating power for their personal usage as well as that of the electricity that was never provided by DISCOs. Due to the enormity of the debt accrued by customers, the network operator initiated a cash collection policy named Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) which involves collecting monies owed through private establishments. This failed to give the anticipated results; hence DISCOs came up with the digital pre-paid meter in 2006 whose operation is somewhat synonymous with the loading of an airtime voucher in the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) handset. If power is available and the pre-paid meter is loaded with units, the loaded unit diminishes only when the load is connected and stops when power is interrupted. In the last decade, smart cards evolved from basic memory cards to complex systems on chips with a processing power that can be expanded. This became an avenue for the invention of many applications used in the world today. The smart card, an intelligent token, is a credit card sized plastic card embedded within an integrated circuit chip. A smart card usually consists of a Read Only Memory (ROM) or flash memory, Electrical Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM) and a Central Processing Unit (CPU). The smart card operating system controls access to data on the card. The card operating system does not only make the smart card secure for access control, but also has the capability to store a private key for a public key infrastructure system.

Recently, the industry has come up with 32-bit smart card processors having more than 400Kbytes of EEPROM, and a memory management and protection unit serving as a firewall for the hardware. This hardware firewall enables secure separation of adjacent applications, as well as being the basis for secure downloading of applications. The self-containment of smart card makes it somewhat attack proof as it does not need to be relied upon potentially attack susceptible external resources. Due to this feature, smart cards are often used in diverse applications which require strong security and authentication. In addition to information security, smart cards achieve greater physical security of services and equipment, because a smart card limits access to only authorized users.

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