Universal Mutual Information Privacy Guarantees for Smart Meters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal privacy-preserving battery charging policy for smart meters that limits information leakage to utility providers while considering energy costs, applicable under various consumption models.

Contribution

It proposes a novel battery charging policy with universal privacy guarantees, adapting coding strategies for stochastic energy consumption models.

Findings

Provides bounds on maximum information leakage.

Ensures privacy guarantees under general stochastic models.

Balances privacy with energy cost constraints.

Abstract

Smart meters enable improvements in electricity distribution system efficiency at some cost in customer privacy. Users with home batteries can mitigate this privacy loss by applying charging policies that mask their underlying energy use. A battery charging policy is proposed and shown to provide universal privacy guarantees subject to a constraint on energy cost. The guarantee bounds our strategy's maximal information leakage from the user to the utility provider under general stochastic models of user energy consumption. The policy construction adapts coding strategies for non-probabilistic permuting channels to this privacy problem.