Advancements in communication and information tech birthed the Smart Grid, optimizing energy and data transmission. Yet, user privacy is at risk due to frequent data collection. Existing privacy schemes face vulnerability with quantum machines. To tackle this, the LPM2DA scheme is introduced, utilizing lattice-based encryption and signatures for secure data aggregation. It ensures privacy, integrity, and authentication, enabling statistical analysis while preserving user privacy. Traditional aggregation schemes suffer from weak network models and centralization issues. Enter SPDBlock, a blockchain-based solution ensuring privacy, integrity, and resistance to attacks. It detects and prosecutes malicious entities while efficiently handling multi-dimensional data transmission. Through distributed decryption and secret sharing, only valid data can be decrypted with minimal involvement from smart meters. Performance tests reveal SPDBlock's superiority in communication and computational efficiency over traditional schemes.
The Ukraine power grid cyberattacks remind us that the smart Internet of Things (IoT) can help us control our light-bulbs, but if under attacks it might also take us into darkness. Nowadays, many literatures have tried to address the concerns on IoT security, but few of them take into consideration the sever threats to IoT coming from the advances of quantum computing. As a promising candidate for the future post-quantum cryptography standard, lattice-based cryptography enjoys the advantages of strong security guarantees and high efficiency, which make it extremely suitable for IoT application…
After the rise of E-commerce, social media and messenger bots, rapid developments have been made in the field of connecting things, gadgets, and devices, i.e, the Internet of Things (IoT). In the fast-paced lifestyle, it is very difficult to maintain multiple keys for traditional mechanical locks. Electromagnetic smart locks are a possible solution to this problem. To connect a smart lock with a key, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol can be used. BLE protocol is vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. Ensuring security over BLE is an ongoing challenge. This paper aims to analyze the M…
With the advent of advanced technology, IoT introduces a vast number of devices connecting with each other and collecting a sheer volume of data. Thus, the demands of IoT security is paramount. Cryptography is being used to secure the networks for authentication, confidentiality, data integrity and access control. However, due to the resource constraint nature of IoT devices, the traditional cryptographic protocols may not be suited in all IoT environments. Researchers, as a result, have been proposing various lightweight cryptographic algorithms and protocols. In this paper, we discuss the st…
Differential privacy (DP) has arisen as the state-of-the-art metric for quantifying individual privacy when sensitive data are analyzed, and it is starting to see practical deployment in organizations such as the US Census Bureau, Apple, Google, etc. There are two popular models for deploying differential privacy - standard differential privacy (SDP), where a trusted server aggregates all the data and runs the DP mechanisms, and local differential privacy (LDP), where each user perturbs their own data and perturbed data is analyzed. Due to security concerns arising from aggregating raw data at…
Due to successful applications of data analysis technologies in many fields, various institutions have accumulated a large amount of data to improve their services. As the speed of data collection has increased dramatically over the last few years, an increasing number of users are growing concerned about their personal information. Therefore, privacy preservation has become an urgent problem to be solved. Differential privacy as a strong privacy preservation tool has attracted significant attention. In this survey, we focus on improving utility of between differentially private mechanisms thr…
We put forward the idea that classical blockchains and smart contracts are potentially useful primitives not only for classical cryptography, but for quantum cryptography as well. Abstractly, a smart contract is a functionality that allows parties to deposit funds, and release them upon fulfillment of algorithmically checkable conditions, and can thus be employed as a formal tool to enforce monetary incentives. In this work, we give the first example of the use of smart contracts in a quantum setting. We describe a simple hybrid classical-quantum payment system whose main ingredients are a cla…
A boardroom election is an election that takes place in a single room -- the boardroom -- in which all voters can see and hear each other. We present an initial exploration of boardroom elections with ballot privacy and voter verifiability that use only "low-tech cryptography" without using computers to mark or collect ballots. Specifically, we define the problem, introduce several building blocks, and propose a new protocol that combines these blocks in novel ways. Our new building blocks include "foldable ballots" that can be rotated to hide the alignment of ballot choices with voting marks,…
Smartphones are quickly moving toward complementing or even replacing traditional car keys. We advocate a role-based access control policy mixed with attributes that facilitates access to various functionalities of vehicular on-board units from smartphones. We use a rights-based access control policy for in-vehicle functionalities similar to the case of a file allocation table of a contemporary OS, in which read, write or execute operations can be performed over various vehicle functions. Further, to assure the appropriate security, we develop a protocol suite using identity-based cryptography…
This work includes a review of two cases study of mobile applications that use Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) to protect communications. It also describes a proposal of a new mobile application that combines the use of IBC for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth communication between smartphones, with the promising Near Field Communication (NFC) technology for secure authentication. The proposed scheme involves NFC pairing to establish as public key a piece of information linked to the device, such as the phone number, so that this information is then used in an IBC scheme for peer-to-peer communication. Th…
Cloud computing comes with a lot of advanced features along with privacy and security problem. Smart meter data takes the benefit of cloud computing in the smart grid. User's privacy can be compromised by analyzing the smart meter data generated by household electrical appliances. The user loses control over the data while data is shifted to the cloud. This paper describes the issues under the privacy and security of smart meter data in the cloud environment. We also compare the existing approaches for preserving the privacy and security of smart meter data.
Recent work has shown that cell phone mobility data has the unique potential to create accurate models for human mobility and consequently the spread of infected diseases. While prior studies have exclusively relied on a mobile network operator's subscribers' aggregated data in modelling disease dynamics, it may be preferable to contemplate aggregated mobility data of infected individuals only. Clearly, naively linking mobile phone data with health records would violate privacy by either allowing to track mobility patterns of infected individuals, leak information on who is infected, or both. …
Development and growth of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has exponentially increased over the course of the last 10 years since its inception, and as a result has directly influenced the popularity and size of smart homes. In this article we present the main technologies and applications that constitute a smart home, we identify the main security and privacy challenges that smart home face and we provide good practices to mitigate those threats.
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 …
Smaller, smarter and faster edge devices in the Internet of things era demands secure data analysis and transmission under resource constraints of hardware architecture. Lightweight cryptography on edge hardware is an emerging topic that is essential to ensure data security in near-sensor computing systems such as mobiles, drones, smart cameras, and wearables. In this article, the current state of memristive cryptography is placed in the context of lightweight hardware cryptography. The paper provides a brief overview of the traditional hardware lightweight cryptography and cryptanalysis appro…
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…
Internet of Things (IoT) is now evolving into a loosely coupled, decentralized system of cooperating smart objects, where high- speed data processing, analytics and shorter response times are becoming more necessary than ever. Such decentralization has a great impact on the way personal information generated and consumed by smart objects should be protected, because, without centralized data management, it is more difficult to control how data are combined and used by smart objects. To cope with this issue, in this paper, we propose a framework where users of smart objects can specify their pr…
The popularity and projected growth of in-home smart speaker assistants, such as Amazon's Echo, has raised privacy concerns among consumers and privacy advocates. Notable questions regarding the collection and storage of user data by for-profit organizations include: what data is being collected and how is it being used, who has or can obtain access to such data, and how can user privacy be maintained while providing useful services. In addition to concerns regarding what the speaker manufacturer will do with your data, there are also more fundamental concerns about the security of these devic…
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 …
The growing market for smart home IoT devices promises new conveniences for consumers while presenting novel challenges for preserving privacy within the home. Specifically, Internet service providers or neighborhood WiFi eavesdroppers can measure Internet traffic rates from smart home devices and infer consumers' private in-home behaviors. Here we propose four strategies that device manufacturers and third parties can take to protect consumers from side-channel traffic rate privacy threats: 1) blocking traffic, 2) concealing DNS, 3) tunneling traffic, and 4) shaping and injecting traffic. We …
The growing market for smart home IoT devices promises new conveniences for consumers while presenting new challenges for preserving privacy within the home. Many smart home devices have always-on sensors that capture users' offline activities in their living spaces and transmit information about these activities on the Internet. In this paper, we demonstrate that an ISP or other network observer can infer privacy sensitive in-home activities by analyzing Internet traffic from smart homes containing commercially-available IoT devices even when the devices use encryption. We evaluate several st…
Intelligence is one of the most important aspects in the development of our future communities. Ranging from smart home, smart building, to smart city, all these smart infrastructures must be supported by intelligent power supply. Smart grid is proposed to solve all challenges of future electricity supply. In smart grid, in order to realize optimal scheduling, a Smart Meter (SM) is installed at each home to collect the near real-time electricity consumption data, which can be used by the utilities to offer better smart home services. However, the near real-time data may disclose user's privacy…
The emerging technologies for large scale data analysis raise new challenges to the security and privacy of sensitive user data. In this work we investigate the problem of private statistical analysis of time-series data in the distributed and semi-honest setting. In particular, we study some properties of Private Stream Aggregation (PSA), first introduced by Shi et al. 2017. This is a computationally secure protocol for the collection and aggregation of data in a distributed network and has a very small communication cost. In the non-adaptive query model, a secure PSA scheme can be built upon…
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 combination of smart home platforms and automation apps introduces much convenience to smart home users. However, this also brings the potential for privacy leakage. If a smart home platform is permitted to collect all the events of a user day and night, then the platform will learn the behavior patterns of this user before long. In this paper, we investigate how IFTTT, one of the most popular smart home platforms, has the capability of monitoring the daily life of a user in a variety of ways that are hardly noticeable. Moreover, we propose multiple ideas for mitigating privacy leakages, w…
Recently, deep learning, which uses Deep Neural Networks (DNN), plays an important role in many fields. A secure neural network model with a secure training/inference scheme is indispensable to many applications. To accomplish such a task usually needs one of the entities (the customer or the service provider) to provide private information (customer's data or the model) to the other. Without a secure scheme and the mutual trust between the service providers and their customers, it will be an impossible mission. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving deep learning model and a sec…
Anonymity revocation is an essential component of credential issuing systems since unconditional anonymity is incompatible with pursuing and sanctioning credential misuse. However, current anonymity revocation approaches have shortcomings with respect to the auditability of the revocation process. In this paper, we propose a novel anonymity revocation approach based on privacy-preserving blockchain-based smart contracts, where the code self-execution property ensures availability and public ledger immutability provides auditability. We describe an instantiation of this approach, provide an imp…
This paper presents a payload security model to maintain the standards of TLS whilst removing obstacles associated with constrained devices and IoT network protocols. The domain of aquaponics as a smart-farming environment was used to test the novelty with ESP32 edge devices. The impact of privacy on message content illustrated the most appropriate security attribute configurations, followed by time and power analysis to calculate energy consumptions of each scenario. It was concluded that using this tailored payload security model rather than TLS was capable of extending the battery life of c…
Smart-meters are a key component of energy transition. The large amount of data collected in near real-time allows grid operators to observe and simulate network states. However, privacy-preserving rules forbid the use of such data for any applications other than network operation and billing. Smart-meter measurements must be anonymised to transmit these sensitive data to a third party to perform network simulation and analysis. This work proposes two methods for data anonymisation that enable the use of raw active power measurements for network simulation and analysis. The first is based on a…
Millions of consumers depend on smart camera systems to remotely monitor their homes and businesses. However, the architecture and design of popular commercial systems require users to relinquish control of their data to untrusted third parties, such as service providers (e.g., the cloud). Third parties therefore can (and in some instances have) access the video footage without the users' knowledge or consent -- violating the core tenet of user privacy. In this paper, we introduce CaCTUs, a privacy-preserving smart camera system that returns control to the user; the root of trust begins with t…
Personal and home sensors generate valuable information that could be used in Smart Cities. Unfortunately, typically, this data is locked out and used only by application/system developer. While vendors are to blame, one should consider also the "binary nature" of data access. Specifically, either owner has full control over her data (e.g. in a "closed system"), or she completely looses control, when the data is "opened". In this context, we propose, a semantic technologies-based, authorization and privacy control framework that enables user to maintain flexible, yet manageable data access con…
Smart grid adopts two-way communication and rich functionalities to gain a positive impact on the sustainability and efficiency of power usage, but on the other hand, also poses serious challenges to customers' privacy. Existing solutions in smart grid usually use cryptographic tools, such as homomorphic encryption, to protect individual privacy, which, however, can only support limited and simple functionalities. Moreover, the resource-constrained smart meters need to perform heavy asymmetric cryptography in these solutions, which is not applied to smart grid. In this paper, we present a prac…
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…
Among existing privacy-preserving approaches, Differential Privacy (DP) is a powerful tool that can provide privacy-preserving noisy query answers over statistical databases and has been widely adopted in many practical fields. In particular, as a privacy machine of DP, Randomized Aggregable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response (RAPPOR) enables strong privacy, efficient, and high-utility guarantees for each client string in data crowdsourcing. However, as for Internet of Things(IoT), such as smart gird, data are often processed in batches. Therefore, developing a new random response algorithm t…
In recent years, the volume of data generated by IoT devices has increased dramatically. Using this data can improve decision-making in the public and private sectors and increase productivity. Many attempts have been made to enhance and adapt businesses to exploit this IoT data. Among these, IoT data trading is the most popular approach. To this end, ongoing projects are currently focused on developing decentralized data marketplaces for IoT using blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Here we explore how a decentralized data marketplace could be created using IOTA tangle and IOTA smart contract ch…
Searching for available parking spaces is a major problem for drivers especially in big crowded cities, causing traffic congestion and air pollution, and wasting drivers' time. Smart parking systems are a novel solution to enable drivers to have real-time parking information for pre-booking. However, current smart parking requires drivers to disclose their private information, such as desired destinations. Moreover, the existing schemes are centralized and vulnerable to the bottleneck of the single point of failure and data breaches. In this paper, we propose a distributed privacy-preserving s…
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…
In the age of Big Data, enabling task scheduling while protecting users' privacy is critical for various decentralized applications in blockchain-based smart contract platforms. Such a privacy-preserving task scheduler requires the task input data to be secretly maintained until a prescribed task execution time and be automatically recorded into the blockchain to enabling the execution of the task at the execution time, even if the user goes offline. While straight-forward centralized approaches provide a basic solution to the problem, unfortunately they are limited to a single point of trust …
Highly accurate profiles of consumers daily energy usage are reported to power grid via smart meters which enables smart grid to effectively regulate power demand and supply. However, consumers energy consumption pattern can reveal personal and sensitive information regarding their lifestyle. Therefore, to ensure users privacy, differentially distributed noise is added to the original data. This technique comes with a trade off between privacy of the consumer versus utility of the data in terms of providing services like billing, Demand Response schemes, and Load Monitoring. In this paper, we …
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…
Fog computing, a non-trivial extension of cloud computing to the edge of the network, has great advantage in providing services with a lower latency. In smart grid, the application of fog computing can greatly facilitate the collection of consumer's fine-grained energy consumption data, which can then be used to draw the load curve and develop a plan or model for power generation. However, such data may also reveal customer's daily activities. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) can monitor an electrical circuit that powers a number of appliances switching on and off independently. If an adve…
Millions of consumers depend on smart camera systems to remotely monitor their homes and businesses. However, the architecture and design of popular commercial systems require users to relinquish control of their data to untrusted third parties, such as service providers (e.g., the cloud). Third parties therefore can (and in some instances have) access the video footage without the users' knowledge or consent -- violating the core tenet of user privacy. In this paper, we present CaCTUs, a privacy-preserving smart Camera system Controlled Totally by Users. CaCTUs returns control to the user; th…
The increasing popularity of specialized Internet-connected devices and appliances, dubbed the Internet-of-Things (IoT), promises both new conveniences and new privacy concerns. Unlike traditional web browsers, many IoT devices have always-on sensors that constantly monitor fine-grained details of users' physical environments and influence the devices' network communications. Passive network observers, such as Internet service providers, could potentially analyze IoT network traffic to infer sensitive details about users. Here, we examine four IoT smart home devices (a Sense sleep monitor, a N…
The popularity of Electric Vehicles (EVs) has been rising across the globe in recent years. Smart grids will be the backbone for EV charging and enable efficient consumption of electricity by the EVs. With the demand for EVs, associated cyber threats are also increasing. Users expose their personal information while charging their EVs, leading to privacy threats. This paper proposes a user-empowered, privacy-aware authenticated key exchange protocol for EV charging in smart grid. The proposed protocol is based on the concept of Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). T…
