Selling power back to the grid in a secure and privacy-preserving manner

Abstract

Smart grid facilitates a customer to sell unused or self-generated power back to the grid. This not only helps the power operator to reduce power generation, but also brings customers a means of getting revenue. However, the process of power selling induces two security problems, namely authentication and privacy-preservation. Like other messages, a customer's request messages for power selling should be properly authenticated to avoid various attacks. At the same time, the customer's privacy such as daily electricity usage pattern should be properly protected. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving protocol to make this possible. Basically, authentication is done by means of anonymous credentials. Even in the reconciliation phase, the power operator only knows how much power a customer has uploaded to the grid but cannot know when the customer has done so. We evaluate our scheme to show that it is effective. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.