Privacy-preserving scheme in smart grid communication using enhanced network coding

Smart Grid (SG) uses communication technology to gather information about the actual and planned power usage in order to enable efficient power provisioning and consumption. Wireless multi-hop communications are used for exchanging data and control messages between smart meters and the utility. With the advent of cybercrimes, there is a growing concern on privacy of the clients. We argue that any communication paradigm used in the SG should support privacy, anonymity, unlinkability, unobservablity, and undetectablity. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, many cyber-attacks such as traffic analysis and flow tracing compromise privacy of the clients. We propose an innovative scheme for traffic routing that benefits from the enhanced network coding technology. Our analysis shows that our scheme maintains privacy of the users despite the possibility of detecting transmitted traffic by an adversary. Moreover, our scheme has extra favourable features such as less computation complexity and robustness of communication.