Anybody home? Keeping user presence privacy for advanced metering in future smart grid

Smart metering, the gateway between power users and power utilities, is one of the key devices in smart grid. In order to decrease the data volume for power consumption report sent from smart meters to power utilities, it is more desirable to use differential transmission scheme, in which a smart meter transmits data only when power consumption is changed. However, such a scheme incurs vulnerabilities. Since, in the differential transmission scheme, the corresponding radio activity is proportional to the power activity. This information can be used by attacker to detect whether the power user is at home. In this paper, we study the privacy of power user for the transmission scheme. When the power user is not present, two defense plans are proposed to generate null packets during idle time to emulate the packet transmission during busy time in order to elude the attacker. Then, Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic based attack methods are proposed to combat the defense plan. Numerical results are used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed defense plans.