.....according to one of the principals of the company, Anthony Sutera. For instance, in RFID tags the nanoparticle spray extended the readable range of the tag from a mere five feet (1.5 meters) to 700 feet (200 m).

The material that Chamtech came up with contains nanoparticles that when sprayed on a surface act as nanocapacitors. The nanocapacitors charge and discharge very quickly and don’t create any heat that can reduce the efficiency of your typical copper antenna.

Another intriguing application, Sutera suggests in the video, is using the spray-on material in the white lines of the highway. This could make it possible to have high bandwidth connectivity in your car.

It features tutorials giving you the very basics of EMFs as well as interactive experiments for low (LF) and high (HF) frequencies using home-made sensors. Basically, we plug an LF and HF sensor to an Arduino board. Then, using a USB bridge, we route the measurements to pretty much any Android mobile phone through a USB wire (using the great Microbridge library). and visualize the data in graphs.

The key to whether such a scenario might be realised is resolution: the more frequently the readings are taken, the more information can be gleaned, and the more information about the lifestyle of households is divulged. As such there is a balance that could be achieved that maintains the infrastructure benefits and protects the privacy of the individual.

The issues do not end with privacy, however, because there are operational security matters to consider, ranging from non-repudiation to meter hijacking. The Netherlands recently rejected smart metering for a whole host of reasons; the decision to implement such a system must be taken very carefully and with a high level of public input.

The first issue is meeting the confidentiality, integrity, availability and legal privacy requirements relating to the information collected by the meter and supplier. The dataset collected will contain personal information (names and addresses and payment details), consumption and usage patterns at an individual and aggregate level and demand and forecasting information. This information is valuable - to criminals, hackers and the organisation - and may prove to be a tempting target for misuse or attack by malware.

The second issue is the physical and information security of the meters themselves. The meters are envisaged to have a life of 20 years or more, so will need to be resistant to physical attack and have mechanisms to upgrade, patch and enhance the device and its software. Additionally, the devices will probably have to be managed remotely and on a massive scale.