Privacy-Enhanced Secure Data Transaction System for Smart Grid

Abstract

A smart grid is a digitally enabled electrical grid that gathers, distributes, and acts on information about the behavior of all participants (suppliers and consumers) in order to improve the efficiency, importance, reliability, economics, and sustainability of electricity services. Currently, smart grid systems are widely considered to be fundamental components for improving the monitoring and control of a power distribution infrastructure. Using a distributed measurement architecture, it is possible to gather information about the smart grid status in order to monitor and control the overall infrastructure, including remote units. This technology can control the use of electricity. In particular, users can monitor and limit the electricity consumption of each home appliance in real time. Likewise, power companies can monitor and control electricity consumption in order to stabilize the electricity supply. However, these features may cause serious problems in the case of data leakage. For example, if a malicious attacker is able to sniff and analyze data, they can figure out the usage pattern and ascertain when a house is empty. Thus, users could suffer serious damage, such as burglary. Therefore, we propose a privacy-enhanced secure data transaction system. The proposed system can protect private data using encryption. The encrypted data includes the user's ID, home appliance serial number, and electricity consumption. Thus, attackers cannot obtain important data for analysis from transaction data. In addition, unauthorized power companies are unable to access this information.