Smart Meter Privacy via the Trapdoor Channel
For smart meter users, this work provides a theoretical privacy guarantee for battery-based privacy mechanisms, though the result is incremental as it extends known concepts to finite capacity batteries.
The paper proposes a battery charging policy for smart meter privacy with finite capacity batteries, providing an upper bound on information leakage rate that depends on average energy consumption, and shows the bound is tight by constructing an achieving process.
A battery charging policy that provides privacy guarantees for smart meter systems with finite capacity battery is proposed. For this policy an upper bound on the information leakage rate is provided. The upper bound applies for general random processes modelling the energy consumption of the user. It is shown that the average energy consumption of the user determines the information leakage rate to the utility provider. The upper bound is shown to be tight by deriving the probability law of a random process achieving the bound.