Secure Data Provenance in Home Energy Monitoring Networks

Abstract

Smart grid empowers home owners to efficiently manage their smart home appliances within a Home Area Network (HAN), by real time monitoring and fine-grained control. However, it offers the possibility for a malicious user to intrude into the HAN and deceive the smart metering system with fraudulent energy usage report. While most of the existing works have focused on how to prevent data tampering in HAN's communication channel, this paper looks into a relatively less studied security aspect namely data provenance. We propose a novel solution based on Shamir's secret sharing and threshold cryptography to guarantee that the reported energy usage is collected from the specific appliance as claimed at a particular location, and that it reflects the real consumption of the energy. A byproduct of the proposed security solution is a guarantee of data integrity. A prototype implementation is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of the proposed solution.