P3: Privacy preservation protocol for appliance control application

Abstract

To address recently emerging concerns on privacy violations, this paper investigates possible sensitive information leakages in the appliance control, which is one of the handiest and most visible applications in smart grids. Without a consistent privacy preservation mechanism, the appliance control system can capture, model and divulge customers' behavior, activities, and personal information at almost every level of society. We investigated a privacy threat model for the appliance control application and further design and implement a protection protocol. Experiment results demonstrate that our protocol merely incurs a substantially light overhead on the appliance control application, but is able to address and solve the formidable challenges both customers and utility companies are facing.