Verifiable and privacy-preserving fine-grained data-collection for smart metering

The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a key component of future Smart Grids, which allows fine-grained and real-time monitoring of the energy consumption of private houses or entire buildings. In an AMI, intelligent devices, namely Smart Meters (SMs), communicate with a Utility Provider (UP) for both management and billing purposes. However, this technology comes at a price in terms of privacy for customers. Indeed, a UP or an external attacker can infer sensitive information on end users, by analyzing their metering data. Therefore, protecting customer's privacy becomes a primary concern in the design of future AMIs. In this paper, we present the initial design of a privacy-preserving AMI and propose a scheme for fine-grained anonymous metering data transmission. Our scheme allows SMs to periodically transmit anonymous metering data to the UP through a multi-hop path composed by other SMs. Unlike previously proposed approaches, our scheme does not rely on trusted third parties. We consider a scenario where SMs are either honest-but-curious or controlled by the UP, whose aim is to deanonymize the received metering data. Our scheme also provides a secure mechanism that allows a Verification Center to verify the functionality of every SM, by accessing its internal log.