iKUP keeps users´ privacy in the Smart Grid

Privacy-enhancing technologies for the Smart Grid usually address either the consolidation of users´ energy consumption or the verification of billing information. The goal of this paper is to introduce iKUP, a protocol that addresses both problems simultaneously. iKUP is an efficient privacy-enhancing protocol based on DC-Nets and Elliptic Curve Cryptography as Commitment. It covers the entire cycle of power provisioning, consumption, billing, and verification. iKUP allows: (i) utility providers to obtain a consolidated energy consumption value that relates to the consumption of a user set, (ii) utility providers to verify the correctness of this consolidated value, and (iii) the verification of the correctness of the billing information by both utility providers and users. iKUP prevents utility providers from identifying individual contributions to the consolidated value and, therefore, protects the users´ privacy. The analytical performance evaluation of iKUP is validated through simulation using as input a real-world data set with over 157 million measurements collected from 6,345 smart meters. Our results show that iKUP has a worse performance than other protocols in aggregation and decryption, which are operations that happen only once per round of measurements and, thus, have a low impact in the total protocol performance. iKUP heavily outperforms other protocols in encryption, which is the most demanded cryptographic function, has the highest impact on the overall protocol performance, and it is executed in the smart meters.