Enabling Anonymous Authorization and Rewarding in the Smart Grid

• Published in: IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing Vol. 14; no. 5; pp. 565 - 572
• Main Authors: Dimitriou, Tassos, Karame, Ghassan O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington IEEE 01.09.2017; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: anonymous data reporting; anonymous rewarding; Authentication; Authorization; Consumption; Debugging; Energy consumption; Incentives; Online banking; Power consumption; privacy; Proposals; Protocols; Public key; Smart grid; Smart grids; Smart meters
• ISSN: 1545-5971; 1941-0018
• DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2015.2496211

The smart grid leverages infrastructural support to achieve fine-grained power consumption monitoring in an attempt to offer higher efficiency, reliability, and security. Such functionality, however, requires the collection of fine-grained usage data which may raise serious concerns with respect to consumer privacy. Thus far, existing work has solely focused on the problem of privately aggregating energy measurements. However, these solutions do not allow the provider to acquire detailed energy measurements which are essential for maintaining the network, debugging configuration problems, etc. In this work, we address this problem and we propose an authentication scheme that allows a smart meter to anonymously interact with the utility provider when submitting detailed consumption data. We then move one step further, enabling the incorporation of anonymous rewarding mechanisms in the smart grid in exchange for detailed measurements that users report. We argue that such rewarding mechanisms provide solid incentives for users to accept the release of their detailed energy consumption; we show that our proposal does notleak any information about the identity of users-even when redeeming the rewards. Finally, we implement a prototype based on our proposal and we evaluate its performance in realistic deployment settings.