Multi-party metering: An architecture for privacy-preserving profiling schemes

2013

Several privacy concerns about the massive deploy- ment of smart meters have been arisen recently. Namely, it has been shown that the fine-grained temporal traces generated by these meters can be correlated with different users behaviors. A new architecture, called multi-party metering, for enabling privacy-preserving analysis of high-frequency metering data without requiring additional complexity at the smart meter side is here proposed. The idea is to allow multiple entities to get a share of the high-frequency metering data rather than the real data, where this share does not reveal any information about the real data. By aggregating the shares provided by different users and publishing …

A secret sharing scheme for anonymous DNS queries

2013

Since its adoption in the early 90's, several privacy concerns have emerged about the Domain Name System (DNS). By collecting the DNS queries performed by each user, it is possible to characterize habits, interests and other sensitive data of the users. Usually, users resolve their {\em url} requests by querying the DSN server belonging to their Internet Service Provider (ISP) and therefore they assume they can trust it. However, different DNS servers can be used, by revealing sensitive data to a partially untrusted entity that can collect and sell this data for several purposes (target advertising, user profiling, etc.). In this paper we address the possibility to integrate tools in the cu…

Large Scale Control of Deferrable Domestic Loads in Smart Grids

2016

International audience; In this paper, we investigate a realistic and low-cost deployment of large scale direct control of inelastic home appliances whose energy demand cannot be shaped, but simply deferred. The idea is to exploit 1) some simple actuators to be placed on the electric plugs for connecting or disconnecting appliances with heterogeneous control interfaces, including non-smart appliances, and 2) the Internet connections of customers for transporting the activation requests from the actuators to a centralized controller. Our solution requires no interaction with home users: in particular, it does not require them to express their energy demand in advance. A queuing theory model …

Unidirectional probabilistic direct control for deferrable loads

2014

International audience; The idea of harnessing the inherent flexibility in demand of many types of electric loads has been largely discussed in the last years for coping with the need to maintain the energy demand-supply balance. In particular, the fine tuning of the operation conditions of different thermostatic loads (such as air-conditioning, refrigerators, etc.) has appeared as the most natural solution for load control with minimal user discomfort. In this paper we focus on an alternative approach: deploying simple open-loop control strategies for deferrable loads with minimal communication overhead. The idea is to send a multicast control message to a group of users, on the basis of t…

Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Admission Control for Smart Grids

2015

International audience; Energy demand and production need to be constantly matched in the power grid. The traditional paradigm to continuously adapt the production to the demand is challenged by the increasing penetration of more variable and less predictable energy sources, like solar photovoltaics and wind power. An alternative approach is the so called direct control of some inherently flexible electric loads to shape the demand. Direct control of deferrable loads presents analogies with flow admission control in telecommunication networks: a request for network resources (bandwidth or energy) can be delayed on the basis of the current network status in order to guarantee some performanc…

PRIVACY-PRESERVING METERING AND LOAD CONTROL IN SMART GRID

In the last decade, electrical grids have experienced an impressive evolution towards the so called Smart Grids, inspired by the Internet model. Indeed, the main driver for this evolution is the exploitation of communication networks for enabling the integration of renewable energy sources and making the energy demand closer to the time-varying production. While witnessing to the incremental deployment of Smart Grids and novel services for Smart Grids, we note a growing awareness on the risks associated to the collection of many sensitive users data. For example, monitoring the temporal trace of the energy consumption data of a given residential customer, may reveal a lot of information on …