Privacy Strategies in Smart Metering

This paper discusses the threat to privacy that smart meters pose and offers solutions that protect user privacy without diminishing the provider’s capabilities to use the data for legitimate purposes. Two use cases are considered: collection of aggregated real-time data by the provider for optimization, and monthly billing of customers. For the first, we present various approaches before proposing our own strategy for an aggregation protocol. For the second, we outline a billing protocol that preserves user privacy.