Repairing an aggregation-based smart metering system

Smart meters inform the electricity suppliers about the consumption of their clients in short intervals. Fine-grained electricity consumption information is highly sensitive as it has been proven to permit to infer people’s habits, for instance, the time they leave or arrive home. Hence, appropriate measures have to be taken to preserve clients’ privacy in smart metering systems. In this paper, we first analyze a recent proposal by Busom et al. (Comput Commun 82:95–101, 2016) and show how a corrupted substation is able to get the individual reading of any arbitrarily chosen smart meter without requiring the collaboration of any other party. After that, we propose a way to fix the mentioned security flaw which is based on adding an additional step in which the substation proves that it has properly followed all the protocol steps. Our solution is analyzed and shown to be computationally feasible for realistic parameter choices.