Secure and Private Data Aggregation for Energy Consumption Scheduling in Smart Grids

The recent proposed solutions for demand side energy management leverage the two-way communication infrastructure provided by modern smart-meters and sharing the usage information with the other users. In this paper, we first highlight the privacy and security issues involved in the distributed demand management protocols. We propose a novel protocol to share required information among users providing privacy, confidentiality, and integrity. We also propose a new clustering-based, distributed multi-party computation (MPC) protocol. Through simulation experiments we demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed solution. The existing solutions typically usually thwart selfish and malicious behavior of consumers by deploying billing mechanisms based on total consumption during a few time slots. However, the billing is typically based on the total usage in each time slot in smart grids. In the second part of this paper, we formally prove that under the per-slot based charging policy, users have incentive to deviate from the proposed protocols. We also propose a protocol to identify untruthful users in these networks. Finally, considering a repeated interaction among honest and dishonest users, we derive the conditions under which the smart grid can enforce cooperation among users and prevents dishonest declaration of consumption.