An efficient privacy protection scheme for the smart meter in electrical distribution system

Abstract

Nowadays, smart meters are being used for measuring power consumption at the consumer end. These smart meters send the energy consumption data to the control center of the service provider at regular intervals. However, the power consumption data may contain certain information of the user that may disclose consumer’s privacy, e.g., the usage pattern. Smart meters may also suffer from numerous physical and cyber-attacks because the smart meter terminal works as a part of open and public infrastructure. Therefore, the authenticity of smart meters is under concern. To address the problem mentioned above, we have proposed here a privacy protection scheme for a smart meter, which requires less computational time as compared to the existing related scheme. Moreover, this scheme scrutinizes the trustworthiness of the smart meter before sending the power consumption information to the service provider. The privacy protection and trustworthiness of the smart meter are proved in theory. Performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme has higher computational efficiency than others.