A secure and privacy-preserving approach to communications in smart grids

Smart grids are electricity networks that can intelligently integrate the action of all connected users – producers, consumers, and prosumers (i.e., producers and consumers at the same time) – in order to efficiently deliver sustainable, economic and secure electricity supplies. Smart grids rely on a two-way communication infrastructures in which energy measurement data taken at users located smart metres, as well as control information, must be exchanged in real-time or – at least – near real-time, while simultaneously guaranteeing a secure and privacy preserving communication. 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 metres 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