Plug-in privacy for smart metering billing

Abstract

Traditional electricity meters are replaced by Smart Meters in customers' households. Smart Meters collect fine-grained utility consumption profiles from customers, which in turn enables the introduction of dynamic, time-of-use tariffs. However, the fine-grained usage data that is compiled in this process also allows to infer the inhabitant's personal schedules and habits. We propose a privacy-preserving protocol that enables billing with time-of-use tariffs without disclosing the actual consumption profile to the supplier. Our approach relies on a zero-knowledge proof based on Pedersen Commitments performed by a plug-in privacy component that is put into the communication link between Smart Meter and supplier's back-end system. We require no changes to the Smart Meter hardware and only small changes to the software of Smart Meter and back-end system. In this paper we describe the functional and privacy requirements, the specification and security proof of our solution and give a performance evaluation of a prototypical implementation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.