Section: Application Domains

Domain 1: Privacy in smart environments

Privacy in smart environments. One illustrative example is our latest work on privacy-preserving smart-metering [2]. Several countries throughout the world are planning to deploy smart meters in house-holds in the very near future. Traditional electrical meters only measure total consumption on a given period of time (i.e., one month or one year). As such, they do not provide accurate information of when the energy was consumed. Smart meters, instead, monitor and report consumption in intervals of few minutes. They allow the utility provider to monitor, almost in real-time, consumption and possibly adjust generation and prices according to the demand. Billing customers by how much is consumed and at what time of day will probably change consumption habits to help matching energy consumption with production. In the longer term, with the advent of smart appliances, it is expected that the smart grid will remotely control selected appliances to reduce demand. Although smart metering might help improving energy management, it creates many new privacy problems. Smart-meters provide very accurate consumption data to electricity providers. As the interval of data collected by smart meters decreases, the ability to disaggregate low-resolution data increases. Analysing high-resolution consumption data, Non-intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring (NALM) can be used to identify a remarkable number of electric appliances (e.g., water heaters, well pumps, furnace blowers, refrigerators, and air conditioners) employing exhaustive appliance signature libraries. We developed DREAM, DiffeRentially privatE smArt Metering, a scheme that is private under the differential privacy model and therefore provides strong and provable guarantees. With our scheme, an (electricity) supplier can periodically collect data from smart-meters and derive aggregated statistics while learning only limited information about the activities of individual households. For example, a supplier cannot tell from a user's trace when he watched TV or turned on heating.