Privacy Friendly Aggregation of Smart Meter Readings, Even When Meters Crash

Abstract

A well studied privacy problem in the area of smart grids is the question of how to aggregate the sum of a set of smart meter readings in a privacy friendly manner, i.e., in such a way that individual meter readings are not revealed to the adversary. Much less well studied is how to deal with arbitrary meter crashes during such aggregation protocols: current privacy friendly aggregation protocols cannot deal with these type of failures. Such failures do happen in practice, though. We therefore propose two privacy friendly aggregation protocols that tolerate such crash failures, up to a predefined maximum number of smart meters. The basic protocol tolerates meter crashes at the start of each aggregation round only. The full, more complex, protocol tolerates meter crashes at arbitrary moments during an aggregation round. It runs in a constant number of phases, cleverly avoiding the otherwise applicable consensus protocol lower bound.