Repairing an aggregation-based smart metering system

Abstract

Smart meters inform the electricity suppliers about the consumption of their clients in short intervals. Fine-grained electricity consumption information is highly sensitive as it has been proven to permit to infer people's habits like, for instance, the time they leave or arrive home. Hence, appropriate measures have to be taken to preserve clients' privacy in smart metering systems. In this paper, we first analyze a recent proposal by Busom et al. (2016) and show how a corrupted substation is able to get the individual reading of any arbitrarily chosen smart meter without requiring the collaboration of any other party. After that, we propose a way to fix the mentioned security flaw which is based on adding an additional step in which the substation proves that it has properly followed all the protocol steps. Our solution is analyzed and shown to be computationally feasible for realistic parameter choices.

This study was funded by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union in the scope of the “Programa Operatiu FEDER de Catalunya 2014–2020” (project number COMRDI16-1-0060), by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (project number MTM2017-83271-R), and by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy of Germany in the SINTEG project DESIGNETZ (project number 03SIN224)