Privacy preserving disclosure of authenticated energy usage data

Abstract

Fine-grained energy usage data made available by recent advancement of smart grid technologies benefit not only electricity utility companies but also customers. Nowadays customers can utilize various services by sharing their own energy usage data. At the same time, such utilization and sharing of electricity usage data with a variety of third party service providers may cause privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss a privacy preserving mechanism for customers' sharing of energy usage data with third parties using non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems. Under our scheme, a customer can, for each data sharing and disclosure, add noise to her electricity usage data without entirely losing verifiability of data authenticity, thereby retaining utility of data at third parties even for billing or accounting purposes.