On Secure Multi-party Computation in Bandwidth-Limited Smart-Meter Systems

The emergence of decentralized energy production pushes the deployment of smart-grid solutions. While the availability of fine-grained consumption data via smart-meter measurements provides several advantages for energy providers (e.g., grid automation, accurate forecasts), they also raise concerns about the privacy of the users. In this paper we present an efficient and privacy-aware communication protocol for future smart-grid solutions. The protocol is based on secure multi-party computation (SMC) and allows deducing the aggregated consumption data of a group of smart meters without disclosing the consumption data of individual smart meters. Moreover, by using a special initialization phase the communication effort is significantly reduced compared to classical SMC-based approaches. For aggregating the consumption data of 100 smart meters, our proposed protocol requires less than one second when assuming a communication bandwidth of 100, kbits/s.