DREAM: DiffeRentially privatE smArt Metering
This addresses privacy concerns for households in smart grid systems, though it appears incremental as it applies differential privacy to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of preserving household privacy in smart metering by introducing a differentially private system that prevents electricity suppliers from inferring individual activities, such as TV watching or heating usage, while allowing aggregated data collection with minimal processing cost.
This paper presents a new privacy-preserving smart metering system. Our scheme is private under the differential privacy model and therefore provides strong and provable guarantees. With our scheme, an (electricity) supplier can periodically collect data from smart meters and derive aggregated statistics while learning only limited information about the activities of individual households. For example, a supplier cannot tell from a user's trace when he watched TV or turned on heating. Our scheme is simple, efficient and practical. Processing cost is very limited: smart meters only have to add noise to their data and encrypt the results with an efficient stream cipher.