As smart grids are getting popular and being widely implemented, preserving the privacy of consumers is becoming more substantial. Power generation and pricing in smart grids depends on the continuously gathered information from the consumers. However, having access to the data relevant to the electricity consumption of each individual consumer is in conflict with its privacy. One common approach for preserving privacy is to aggregate data of different consumers and to use their smart-meters for calculating the bills. But in this approach, malicious consumers who send erroneous data to take advantage or disrupt smart grid cannot be identified. In this paper, we propose a new statistical-based scheme for data gathering and billing in which the privacy of consumers is preserved, and at the same time, if any consumer with erroneous data can be detected. Our simulation results verify these matters.
In @cite_20 , the authors present a new kind of attack, which adversary extracts information about the presence or absence of a consumer to access the smart meter information. The attack is called human-factor-aware differential aggregation (HDA) and it is claimed that other proposed schemes cannot handle it. To solve this issue, the authors introduce two privacy-preserving schemes which can stand out against HDA attack by transmitting encrypted measurements to an aggregator in a way that aggregator cannot steal any information of human activities.
@cite_20
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Privacy-preserving metering aggregation is regarded as an important research topic in securing a smart grid. In this paper, we first identify and formalize a new attack, in which the attacker could exploit the information about the presence or absence of a specific person to infer his meter readings. This attack, coined as human-factor-aware differential aggregation (HDA) attack, cannot be addressed in existing privacy-preserving aggregation protocols proposed for smart grids. We give a formal definition on it and propose two novel protocols, including basic scheme and advanced scheme, to achieve privacy-preserving smart metering data aggregation and to resist the HDA attack. Our protocol ensures that smart meters periodically upload encrypted measurements to a (electricity) supplier aggregator such that the aggregator is able to derive the aggregated statistics of all meter measurements but is unable to learn any information about the human activities. We present the formal security analysis for the proposed protocol to guarantee the strong privacy. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of our protocol in a Java-based implementation under different parameters. The performance and utility analysis shows that our protocol is simple, efficient, and practical.