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“Hello? Is There Anybody in There?” Leakage Assessment of Differential Privacy Mechanisms in Smart Metering Infrastructure

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Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14585))

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Abstract

Smart meters provide fine-grained power usage profiles of consumers to utility providers to facilitate various grid functionalities such as load monitoring, real-time pricing, etc. However, information leakage from these usage profiles can potentially reveal sensitive aspects of consumers’ daily routines and their home absence, as state-of-the-art metering strategies lack adequate security and privacy measures. Among various privacy-preserving mechanisms, Differential Privacy (DP) is widely adopted in the literature due to its solid mathematical foundation. Nevertheless, the privacy-utility trade-off problem in smart metering systems limits the amount of privacy protection various instances of DP mechanisms can provide. We demonstrate that the constraints imposed by the privacy-utility trade-off make it possible to launch empirical statistical attacks on the differential private metering data. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical methodology, constructed using the principles of t-test based hypothesis testing, to discover the absence of a consumer in their household upon observing real-time differentially private output traces of sensitive meter readings over successive sampling windows. Additionally, we formally establish that this trade-off is an inherent characteristic of the smart metering problem, implying that any mechanism adhering to this trade-off is susceptible to our attack. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation using a real-world metering dataset to validate our proposed methodology. We evaluate our scheme against six state-of-the-art DP mechanisms employed in metering infrastructure. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach attains a success rate exceeding \(90\%\) within a mere six-hour observation interval, highlighting its effectiveness in revealing vulnerabilities within established DP implementations.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions for improving the paper. They would also like to thank the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt of India, IHUB NTIHAC Foundation, C3i Building, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and Centre on Hardware-Security Entrepreneurship Research and Development, Meity, India, for partially funding this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

    Soumyadyuti Ghosh, Soumyajit Dey & Debdeep Mukhopadhyay

  2. New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Manaar Alam & Debdeep Mukhopadhyay

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  1. Soumyadyuti Ghosh
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  2. Manaar Alam
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Correspondence to Soumyadyuti Ghosh .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Christina Pöpper

  2. Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Lejla Batina

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Ghosh, S., Alam, M., Dey, S., Mukhopadhyay, D. (2024). “Hello? Is There Anybody in There?” Leakage Assessment of Differential Privacy Mechanisms in Smart Metering Infrastructure. In: Pöpper, C., Batina, L. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14585. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54776-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54776-8_7

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