Smart Metering: Inferences of Appliance Status from Fine-Grained Readings

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss how sensitive information about a household’s appliance status may be leaked from fine-grained smart meter readings. This is also an example of side channel leak because the readings are not supposed to serve as a channel for learning about individual appliances’ on/off status. While the features in smart grid, underpinned by the fine-grained usage information, provide significant benefits for both utility and customers, they also pose new security and privacy challenges. Existing solutions on privacy-preserving smart metering usually assume the readings to be sensitive and aim at protecting the readings through aggregation. In this chapter, we observe that the privacy issue in smart metering goes beyond the fine-grained readings themselves. That is, it may not be sufficient to simply focus on protecting such readings through aggregation or other techniques, without first understanding how such readings may lead to inferences of the truly sensitive information, that is, the appliance status. To address this issue, we present a formal model for privacy based on inferring appliance status from fine-grained meter readings.