Khadija Hafeez

Khadija Hafeez, Donna OShea, Thomas Newe et al.

High frequency reporting of energy consumption data in smart grids can be used to infer sensitive information regarding the consumer's life style and poses serious security and privacy threats. Differential privacy (DP) based privacy models for smart grids ensure privacy when analysing energy consumption data for billing and load monitoring. However, DP models for smart grids are vulnerable to collusion attack where an adversary colludes with malicious smart meters and un-trusted aggregator in order to get private information from other smart meters. We first show the vulnerability of DP based privacy model for smart grids against collusion attacks to establish the need of a collusion resistant model privacy model. Then, we propose an Enhanced Differential Private Noise Cancellation Model for Load Monitoring and Billing for Smart Meters (E-DPNCT) which not only provides resistance against collusion attacks but also protects the privacy of the smart grid data while providing accurate billing and load monitoring. We use differential privacy with a split noise cancellation protocol with multiple master smart meters (MSMs) to achieve colluison resistance. We did extensive comparison of our E-DPNCT model with state of the art attack resistant privacy preserving models such as EPIC for collusion attack. We simulate our E-DPNCT model with real time data which shows significant improvement in privacy attack scenarios. Further, we analyze the impact of selecting different sensitivity parameters for calibrating DP noise over the privacy of customer electricity profile and accuracy of electricity data aggregation such as load monitoring and billing.

Khadija Hafeez, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Donna OShea

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 propose a technique - Differential Privacy with Noise Cancellation Technique (DPNCT) - to maximize utility in aggregated load monitoring and fair billing while preserving users privacy by using noise cancellation mechanism on differentially private data. We introduce noise to the sensitive data stream before it leaves smart meters in order to guarantee privacy at individual level. Further, we evaluate the effects of different periodic noise cancelling schemes on privacy and utility i.e., billing and load monitoring. Our proposed scheme outperforms the existing scheme in terms of preserving the privacy while accurately calculating the bill.