A privacy-preserving aggregation scheme based on immunological negative surveys for smart meters

Abstract The smart meter is a basic device of the smart grid, which improves the efficiency of the power grid and brings a lot of convenience for the industry and people’s daily life. However, real-time power consumption data contain some sensitive information, and could disclose the privacy of users. As an immunological technique, the negative survey is proposed to preserve the privacy of static data. In this paper, firstly, we demonstrate that traditional negative survey might disclose the privacy of users when it is used to collect time-series data. Secondly, we propose an improved negative survey method for collecting the time-series data. Thirdly, for the first time, we apply the negative survey to preserving the privacy of the power consumption data aggregated from smart meters. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the method proposed in this paper could aggregate the power consumption data while preserving the privacy of users. Compared with existing techniques, our method is simple and efficient, and does not need a trusted third party. Moreover, it could tolerate the failure of some users and resist differential attack.