Enforcing privacy in smart grid communications

The recent introduction of renewable energy sources in the traditional power grid has highlighted the need for a completely re-designed power grid to be coupled with a distributed communication infrastructure able to efficiently operate such a new "smart" grid In this work we propose a novel communication architecture able to efficiently deal with the distribution of the energy measurements collected by the smart meters, while simultaneously coping with several privacy and security constraints. Our proposal is based on a heterogeneous architecture that makes use of functional nodes (namely the privacy peers) interposed between the users and the utility server. The proposed architecture is able to deal with both the need of anonymizing the measurement data (by implementing a Secure Multiparty Computation method) and of simultaneously attributing these data to the users for billing purposes. Moreover, we also show that our architecture is robust to both semi-honest and malicious adversaries.