Despicable me(ter): Anonymous and fine-grained metering data reporting with dishonest meters

The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a fundamental component of modern Smart Grids, and allows fine-grained and real-time monitoring of the electricity consumption of utility customers. In an AMI, intelligent devices commonly called Smart Meters (SMs) communicate with an operation center for the purpose of management and billing. However, while on one hand this technology has the potential for advanced load balancing and grid management, it poses a threat to customers privacy. Indeed, an adversary can infer sensitive information about the end users by analyzing the metering data reported by the SMs. In this paper, we present the design of a privacy-preserving AMI for fine-grained metering data collection. We propose a collaborative protocol among SMs that achieves anonymous metering data delivery via a random multi-hop path. Our construction enables a verifier entity to detect any inconsistent behavior from SMs by accessing their internal log. Our scheme is scalable with the number of SMs in the network, and unlike existing methods, does not rely on trusted third-parties. We consider an adversarial setting where SMs are either honest-but-curious or controlled by a powerful adversary, whose aim is to deanonymize the received metering data. Finally, we prove that our protocol is secure and computationally efficient for the resource-constrained SM devices.