Privacy preserving smart grid Communications by verifiable secret key sharing

Smart grids rely on communication infrastructures in which energy measurements taken at users located smart meters must be exchanged in a secure and privacy preserving way. This paper addresses such a problem by presenting a distributed communication architecture that guarantees the privacy of fine-grained users data while enabling the energy supplier to access aggregate energy measurements and per-user coarse-grained data for billing purposes. The key idea underlying the proposed architecture is to adopt a Secure Multiparty Computation method based on a verifiable secret sharing of the keys used by the smart meters to encrypt their sensitive data. This approach allows to remove the need for any intermediate aggregator element with clear benefits in terms of scalability and robustness.