Efficient smart metering based on homomorphic encryption

Smart meters send fine-grained client electricity consumption readings to suppliers. Although this presents advantages for both entities, it results in a serious loss of privacy for customers. We present a monitoring-purpose system that preserves customers’ privacy by homomorphically aggregating the consumptions of all n members of a neighborhood. The proposal has an efficient linear O(n) communication cost and is proven to preserve customers’ privacy even in the presence of a corrupted substation and some malicious smart meters. It requires neither secure communication channels nor a trusted third party (except for issuing public-key certificates). Computation on the smart meters is limited to modular exponentiations. These favorable properties come at the expense of increased computation cost on the electricity suppliers’ side. We show that the computation is easily feasible for realistic parameter choices.