PMBFE: Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Monitoring and Billing Using Functional Encryption for AMI Networks

Preserving the customers' privacy, while collecting their power consumption for monitoring and billing, is a prime concern in an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network of the Smart Grid (SG). In this paper, we address this concern by formally formulating the data aggregation privacy problem, and propose a uniquely crafted Privacy-Preserving Monitoring and Billing scheme using Functional Encryption, referred to as PMBFE. Our proposed PMBFE fulfills four key objectives: (i) data aggregation for billing, (ii) dynamic pricing flexibility, (iii) load monitoring with customers' privacy preservation; and (iv) analysis on how the adopted functional encryption is able to jointly perform data aggregation efficiently and guarantee privacy-preservation. Our envisioned PMBFE approach is evaluated with extensive computer-based simulations. In contrast with the widely employed homomorphic-based encryption in AMI networks, our proposed PMBFE demonstrates significant performance improvement in terms of both communication and computation overheads while guaranteeing user-data privacy. Furthermore, the conducted security analysis exhibits the robustness of our proposal against collusion and eavesdropping attacks.