A Distributed Privacy-Aware Architecture for Communication in Smart Grids

The recent introduction of the smart grids poses the need for a distributed communication infrastructure able to efficiently transmit the energy measurements collected by the smart meters, while simultaneously coping with several privacy and security constraints. In this work we introduce a novel communication architecture able to efficiently solve such a problem. Our proposal is based on a heterogeneous architecture that makes use of functional nodes (namely the privacy peers) that are interposed between the users and the utility server. The proposed architecture is able to deal with both the need of anonymizing the measurement data (by implementing a Secure Multiparty Computation method) and of simultaneously attributing these data to the users for billing purposes. Moreover, we also show that our architecture is robust to both semi-honest and malicious adversaries.