In recent years, many proposals have arisen from research on privacy in smart metering. In one of the considered approaches, referred to as anonymization, smart meters transmit fine-grained electricity consumption values in such a way that the energy supplier can not exactly determine procedence. This paper measures the real privacy provided by such approach by taking into account that at the end of a billing period the energy supplier collects the overall electricity consumption of each meter for billing purposes. An entropy-based measure is proposed for quantifying privacy and determine the extent to which knowledge on the overall consumption of meters allows to re-identify anonymous fine-grained consumption values.
This paper presents a new privacy-preserving smart metering system. Our scheme is private under the differential privacy model and therefore provides strong and provable guarantees. With our scheme, an (electricity) supplier can periodically collect data from smart meters and derive aggregated statistics while learning only limited information about the activities of individual households. For example, a supplier cannot tell from a user's trace when he watched TV or turned on heating. Our scheme is simple, efficient and practical. Processing cost is very limited: smart meters only have to add …
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) have rapidly become a topic of international interest as governments have sponsored their deployment for the purposes of utility service reliability and efficiency, e.g., water and electricity conservation. Two problems plague such deployments. First is the protection of consumer privacy. Second is the problem of huge amounts of data from such deployments. A new architecture is proposed to address these problems through the use of Aggregators, which incorporate temporary data buffering and the modularization of utility grid analysis. These Aggregators are…
Smart Grids are evolving as the next generation power systems that involve changes in the traditional ways of generation, transmission and distribution of power. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the key components in smart grids. An AMI comprises of systems and networks, that collects and analyzes data received from smart meters. In addition, AMI also provides intelligent management of various power-related applications and services based on the data collected from smart meters. Thus, AMI plays a significant role in the smooth functioning of smart grids. AMI is a privileged tar…
The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a vital element in the current development of the smart grid. AMI technologies provide electric utilities with an effective way of continuous monitoring and remote control of smart grid components. However, owing to its increasing scale and cyber-physical nature, the AMI has been faced with security threats in both cyber and physical domains. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the crucial cyber-physical attacks and counter defense mechanisms in the AMI. First, two attack surfaces are surveyed in the AMI including the communication networ…
Advanced Metering Infrastructure forms a communication network for the collection of power data from smart meters in Smart Grid. As the communication between smart meters could be secured utilizing public-key cryptography, however, public-key cryptography still has certain challenges in terms of certificate revocation and management particularly related distribution and storage overhead of revoked certificates. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel revocation management approach by utilizing cryptographic accumulators which reduces the space requirements for revocation i…
In this paper we propose a novel protocol that allows suppliers and grid operators to collect users' aggregate metering data in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. We use secure multiparty computation to ensure privacy protection. In addition, we propose three different data aggregation algorithms that offer different balances between privacy-protection and performance. Our protocol is designed for a realistic scenario in which the data need to be sent to different parties, such as grid operators and suppliers. Furthermore, it facilitates an accurate calculation of transmission, distributi…
Traditional electricity meters are replaced by Smart Meters in customers' households. Smart Meters collects fine-grained utility consumption profiles from customers, which in turn enables the introduction of dynamic, time-of-use tariffs. However, the fine-grained usage data that is compiled in this process also allows to infer the inhabitant's personal schedules and habits. We propose a privacy-preserving protocol that enables billing with time-of-use tariffs without disclosing the actual consumption profile to the supplier. Our approach relies on a zero-knowledge proof based on Pedersen Commi…
Energy providers are moving to the smart meter era, encouraging consumers to install, free of charge, these devices in their homes, automating consumption readings submission and making consumers life easier. However, the increased deployment of such smart devices brings a lot of security and privacy risks. In order to overcome such risks, Intrusion Detection Systems are presented as pertinent tools that can provide network-level protection for smart devices deployed in home environments. In this context, this paper is exploring the problems of Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMI) and propo…
In smart grid, the Utility Provider (UP) collects users power measurements' for two main reasons: billing and operation. Billing needs coarse-grained measurements where there are no, or minimal, privacy concerns. On the other hand, operation needs fine-grained measurements which can highly affect users' privacy. Hence, users might be reluctant to participate in operational metering to protect their privacy. To overcome this issue, UP might offer rewards to allure users to report their measurements which endangers their privacy. In this paper, we survey the literature on privacy-preserving mete…
Smart metering is an essential feature of smart grids, allowing residential customers to monitor and reduce electricity costs. Devices called smart meters allows residential customers to monitor and reduce electricity costs, promoting energy saving, demand management, and energy efficiency. However, monitoring a households' energy consumption through smart meters poses serious privacy threats, and have thus become a major privacy issue. Hence, a significant amount of research has appeared recently with the purpose of providing methods and mechanisms to reconcile smart metering technologies and…
The concept of differential privacy emerged as a strong notion to protect database privacy in an untrusted environment. Later on, researchers proposed several variants of differential privacy in order to preserve privacy in certain other scenarios, such as real-time cyber physical systems. Since then, differential privacy has rigorously been applied to certain other domains which has the need of privacy preservation. One such domain is decentralized blockchain based smart metering, in which smart meters acting as blockchain nodes sent their real-time data to grid utility databases for real-tim…
Most of the smart applications, such as smart energy metering devices, demand strong privacy preservation to strengthen data privacy. However, it is difficult to protect the privacy of the smart device data, especially on the client side. It is mainly because payment for billing is computed by the server deployed at the client's side, and it is highly challenging to prevent the leakage of client's information to unauthorised users. Various researchers have discussed this problem and have proposed different privacy preservation techniques. Conventional techniques suffer from the problem of high…
Electricity is an essential comfort to support our daily activities. With the competitive increase and energy costs by the industry, new values and opportunities for delivering electricity to customers are produced. One of these new opportunities is electric vehicles. With the arrival of electric vehicles, various challenges and opportunities are being presented in the electric power system worldwide. For example, under the traditional electric power billing scheme, electric power has to be consumed where it is needed so that end-users could not charge their electric vehicles at different poin…
Smart metering infrastructure (SMI) is the core component of the smart grid (SG) which enables two-way communication between consumers and utility companies to control, monitor, and manage the energy consumption data. Despite their salient features, SMIs equipped with information and communication technology are associated with new threats due to their dependency on public communication networks. Therefore, the security of SMI communications raises the need for robust authentication and key agreement primitives that can satisfy the security requirements of the SG. Thus, in order to realize the…
In the smart grid, smart meters, and numerous control and monitoring applications employ bidirectional wireless communication, where security is a critical issue. In key management based encryption method for the smart grid, the Trusted Third Party (TTP), and links between the smart meter and the third party are assumed to be fully trusted and reliable. However, in wired/wireless medium, a man-in-middle may want to interfere, monitor and control the network, thus exposing its vulnerability. Acknowledging this, in this paper, we propose a novel two level encryption method based on two partially…
Tennessee Tech. University（田纳西理工大学）；Idaho State University（爱达荷州立大学）；Umm Al-Qura University（乌姆·库拉大学）
In smart grid, malicious customers may compromise their smart meters (SMs) to report false readings to achieve financial gains illegally. Reporting false readings not only causes hefty financial losses to the utility but may also degrade the grid performance because the reported readings are used for energy management. This paper is the first work that investigates this problem in the net-metering system, in which one SM is used to report the difference between the power consumed and the power generated. First, we prepare a benign dataset for the net-metering system by processing a real power …
In smart grid, large quantities of data is collected from various applications, such as smart metering substation state monitoring, electric energy data acquisition, and smart home. Big data acquired in smart grid applications usually is sensitive. For instance, in order to dispatch accurately and support the dynamic price, lots of smart meters are installed at user's house to collect the real-time data, but all these collected data are related to user privacy. In this paper, we propose a data aggregation scheme based on secret sharing with error tolerance in smart grid, which ensures that the…
In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of privacy-preserving schemes for Smart Grid communications. Specifically, we select and in-detail examine thirty privacy preserving schemes developed for or applied in the context of Smart Grids. Based on the communication and system models, we classify these schemes that are published between 2013 and 2016, in five categories, including, 1) Smart grid with the advanced metering infrastructure, 2) Data aggregation communications, 3) Smart grid marketing architecture, 4) Smart community of home gateways, and 5) Vehicle-to grid architecture. For …
There has been a large number of contributions on privacy-preserving smart metering with Differential Privacy, addressing questions from actual enforcement at the smart meter to billing at the energy provider. However, exploitation is mostly limited to application of cryptographic security means between smart meters and energy providers. We illustrate along the use case of privacy preserving load forecasting that Differential Privacy is indeed a valuable addition that unlocks novel information flows for optimization. We show that (i) there are large differences in utility along three selected …
Privacy by design will become a legal obligation in the European Community if the Data Protection Regulation eventually gets adopted. However, taking into account privacy requirements in the design of a system is a challenging task. We propose an approach based on the specification of privacy architectures and focus on a key aspect of privacy, data minimisation, and its tension with integrity requirements. We illustrate our formal framework through a smart metering case study.
Tampering of metering infrastructure of an electrical distribution system can significantly cause customers' billing discrepancy. The large-scale deployment of smart meters may potentially be tampered by malware by propagating their agents to other IP-based meters. Such a possibility is to pivot through the physical perimeters of a smart meter. While this framework may help utilities to accurately energy consumption information on the regular basis, it is challenging to identify malicious meters when there is a large number of users that are exploited to vulnerability and kWh information being…
In order to efficiently provide demand side management (DSM) in smart grid, carrying out pricing on the basis of real-time energy usage is considered to be the most vital tool because it is directly linked with the finances associated with smart meters. Hence, every smart meter user wants to pay the minimum possible amount along with getting maximum benefits. In this context, usage based dynamic pricing strategies of DSM plays their role and provide users with specific incentives that help shaping their load curve according to the forecasted load. However, these reported real-time values can l…
In Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems, smart meters (SM) send fine-grained power consumption information to the utility company, yet this power consumption information can uncover sensitive information about the consumers' lifestyle. To allow the utility company to gather the power consumption information while safeguarding the consumers' privacy, different methods that broadly utilize symmetric key and asymmetric key cryptography operation have been generally utilized. In this paper, we propose an effective method that uses symmetric key cryptography and hashing operation to gathe…
The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will take effect in May 2018, and hence, designing compliant data protection policies and system architectures became crucial for organizations to avoid penalties. Unfortunately, the regulations given in a textual format can be easily misinterpreted by the policy and system designers, which also making the conformance check error-prone for auditors. In this paper, we apply formal approach to facilitate systematic design of policies and architectures in an unambiguous way, and provide a framework for mathematically sound conformance checks again…
In modern smart grids, the proliferation of communication-enabled distributed energy resource (DER) systems has increased the surface of possible cyber-physical attacks. Attacks originating from the distributed edge devices of DER system, such as photovoltaic (PV) system, is often difficult to detect. An attacker may change the control configurations or various setpoints of the PV inverters to destabilize the power grid, damage devices, or for the purpose of economic gain. A more powerful attacker may even manipulate the PV system metering data transmitted for remote monitoring, so that (s)he …
Private data generated by edge devices -- from smart phones to automotive electronics -- are highly informative when aggregated but can be damaging when mishandled. A variety of solutions are being explored but have not yet won the public's trust and full backing of mobile platforms. In this work, we propose numerical aggregation protocols that empirically improve upon prior art, while providing comparable local differential privacy guarantees. Sharing a single private bit per value supports privacy metering that enable privacy controls and guarantees that are not covered by differential priva…
Utilities around the world are reported to invest a total of around 30 billion over the next few years for installation of more than 300 million smart meters, replacing traditional analog meters [1]. By mid-decade, with full country wide deployment, there will be almost 1.3 billion smart meters in place [1]. Collection of fine grained energy usage data by these smart meters provides numerous advantages such as energy savings for customers with use of demand optimization, a billing system of higher accuracy with dynamic pricing programs, bidirectional information exchange ability between end-us…
In the digital era, users share their personal data with service providers to obtain some utility, e.g., access to high-quality services. Yet, the induced information flows raise privacy and integrity concerns. Consequently, cautious users may want to protect their privacy by minimizing the amount of information they disclose to curious service providers. Service providers are interested in verifying the integrity of the users' data to improve their services and obtain useful knowledge for their business. In this work, we present a generic solution to the trade-off between privacy, integrity, …
The virtual dimension called `Cyberspace' built on internet technologies has served people's daily lives for decades. Now it offers advanced services and connected experiences with the developing pervasive computing technologies that digitise, collect, and analyse users' activity data. This changes how user information gets collected and impacts user privacy at traditional cyberspace gateways, including the devices carried by users for daily use. This work investigates the impacts and surveys privacy concerns caused by this data collection, namely identity tracking from browsing activities, us…
