Privacy-preserving smart metering with regional statistics and personal enquiry services

In smart grid, households may send the readings of their energy usage to the utility and a third-party service provider which provides analyzed statistics data to users. User privacy becomes an important issue in this application. In this paper, we propose a new cryptographic-based solution for the privacy issue in smart grid systems. The advantages of our system are twofold: Households can send authenticated energy consumption readings to a third-party service provider anonymously. The service provider learns only the region where the readings come from but not their respective identities. On the other hand, users with personal secret information can enquiry their usage history records or regional statistics. Formal security analysis is provided to show that our scheme is secure. We further analyze the performance of our system by giving simulation results.