Abstract
Smart meters are integral to demand response in
emerging smart grids, by reporting the electricity consumption
of users to serve application needs. But reporting real-time usage
information for individual households raises privacy concerns.
Existing techniques to guarantee differential privacy (DP) of
smart meter users either are not fault tolerant or achieve (possibly
partial) fault tolerance at high communication overheads. In this
paper, we propose a fault-tolerant protocol for smart metering
that can handle general communication failures while ensuring
DP with significantly improved efficiency and lower errors compared
with the state of the art. Our protocol handles fail-stop
faults proactively by using a novel design of future ciphertexts,
and distributes trust among the smart meters by sharing secret
keys among them. We prove the DP properties of our protocol
and analyze its advantages in fault tolerance, accuracy, and
communication efficiency relative to competing techniques. We
illustrate our analysis by simulations driven by real-world traces
of electricity consumption.
