A framework for privacy-preserving data sharing in the Smart Grid

Abstract

Distributed energy resources, featured with small-scale power generation technologies and renewable energy sources, have been considered as a necessary supplement for the smart grid. In order to make the merged power grid to be still smart, the data generated at the consumer side should be shared among the energy resources. However, this approach brings difficulties on how to protect consumers' privacy. To deal with the problem, in this paper, we propose a new framework for data sharing in the smart grid by using a combination of homomorphic encryption and proxy re-encryption techniques. The proposed framework allows the energy resources to be able to analyze the consumers' data while keeping the consumers' privacy. Another good property of our proposed framework is that the consumers' data is transmitted over the smart grid only once. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is first attempt to consider an important problem concerning data sharing in the smart grid.