Measuring privacy in smart metering anonymized data
This addresses privacy risks for consumers in smart grid systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing anonymization approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of measuring privacy in anonymized smart metering data by proposing an entropy-based measure to quantify how knowledge of overall consumption can re-identify fine-grained values, showing that anonymization alone may not provide sufficient privacy.
In recent years, many proposals have arisen from research on privacy in smart metering. In one of the considered approaches, referred to as anonymization, smart meters transmit fine-grained electricity consumption values in such a way that the energy supplier can not exactly determine procedence. This paper measures the real privacy provided by such approach by taking into account that at the end of a billing period the energy supplier collects the overall electricity consumption of each meter for billing purposes. An entropy-based measure is proposed for quantifying privacy and determine the extent to which knowledge on the overall consumption of meters allows to re-identify anonymous fine-grained consumption values.