Enhanced Network Coding to Maintain Privacy in Smart Grid Communication

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are aimed at combining the physical system with the cyber ones to provide a better control and improve the management of physical systems around us. Recently, the CPS and its applications, e.g., health-care and smart grid, have gained attention of the research community. In this paper, we consider the privacy aspect of users in a CPS, particularly in smart grid system as our use-case, and provide a mechanism that utilizes the advances in network coding to maintain data privacy. We address privacy issues associated with gathering metering information of clients in a smart grid system. In smart grid systems, wireless multi-hop communications are mainly used to gather metering information through exchanging data and control messages between smart meters and the utility. We argue that any communication paradigm used in a smart grid should support all aspects of privacy such as anonymity, unlinkability, unobservablity, and undetectablity. We propose innovative schemes for traffic routing and encryption that benefit from the enhanced network coding technology. Our analysis shows that our schemes maintain privacy of users despite the possibility of detecting metering data by an adversary. In addition, our scheme has extra favorable features such as less computation complexity, reliable, and robust communication.

Smart Grid Metering Networks: A Survey on Security, Privacy and Open Research Issues

“…From the broad perspective, unlinkability is paramount property that needs to be implemented at different level such as, home area network (smart meter, sensor, home gateway, etc.) and field area network (i.e., data concentrator and substations that are located in cloud or SG servers) [86].…”

“…Moreover, it can be noted that none of the routing scheme is designed with a focus of routing privacy, except Nicanfar et al's scheme [86]. Preliminary solution: Nicanfar et al [86] proposed a new secure routing algorithm to route the packets from source to destination. The routing algorithm utilized network coding technology.…”

A Review of the Topologies Used in Smart Water Meter Networks: A Wireless Sensor Network Application

“…Consumers have privacy issues with the large amount of data about their everyday habits being recording by their smart meters [9]. One of their main concerns is the detection of their presence in their homes through the use of this data [10].…”

Cyber security for smart grid systems: Status, challenges and perspectives

“…1) Cyber Attacks Targeting Confidentiality These attacks allow access to information to unauthorized users in the smart grid [23], [24]. Malicious users misuse the information to harm others or take advantages from it.…”

“…To provide defense to cyber attacks targeting confidentiality in the power grid, network coding has been presented to maintain data privacy in the grid where all aspects of privacy such as anonymity, unlinkability, unobservablity, and undetectablity have been achieved [23], [24].…”