Optimizing Smart Grid Aggregators and Measuring Degree of Privacy in a Distributed Trust Based Anonymous Aggregation System

TL;DR

This paper introduces DTBAS, a distributed trust-based anonymous aggregation system for smart grids that ensures consumer privacy using secret sharing and anonymity, resistant to both active and passive attacks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel system that guarantees consumer privacy with only three aggregators, employing cryptographic proofs and trust mechanisms, improving privacy assurance in smart grid data collection.

Findings

Three aggregators suffice for privacy in the system

The system is resistant to active and passive attacks

Mathematical and cryptographic proofs validate the approach

Abstract

A smart grid is an advanced method for supplying electricity to the consumers alleviating the limitations of the existing system. It causes frequent meter reading transmission from the end-user to the supplier. This frequent data transmission poses privacy risks. Several works have been proposed to solve this problem but cannot ensure privacy at the optimal level. This work is based on a distributed trust-based data aggregation system leveraging a secret sharing mechanism. In this work, we show that {\em three aggregators} are enough for ensuring consumer's privacy in a distributed trust-based system. We leverage the idea of anonymity in our research and show that neither an active attacker nor a passive attacker can breach consumer's privacy. We show proof of our concept mathematically and in a cryptographic game based mechanism. We name our new proposed system \emph{"Distributed Trust Based Anonymous System (DTBAS)"}.