A user-transparent pseudonym renewal scheme for smart meters in incentive-based demand response programs

Abstract

The pseudonym-based smart meter privacy-preserving schemes allow the fine-grained metering data to be preserved, which in turn enables many advanced measures to be applied into the electricity market, such as Incentive-Based Demand Response (IDR). However, in the currently known pseudonym-based privacy-preserving schemes that are compatible with IDR, there are two aspects that can be improved further. Firstly, the computational costs needed by the pseudonym registration protocol of these schemes are expensive that user devices are needed to run it efficiently, so this procedure is not transparent to customers. Secondly, customer’s involvement may cause the renewal procedure to be delayed and also weaken the effect against de-pseudonymization attack. Aiming at these two aspects, a user-transparent renewal scheme is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, the computational costs are reduced based on the restrictive blind signature, and the pseudonym renewal procedure can run in the smart meter without requiring any user’s intervention, i.e., this procedure is user-transparent. Furthermore, the user-transparent renewal scheme allows more stringent pseudonym renewal rules to be applied, so a coordinated renewal rule is proposed in this paper. Instead of allowing a customer to renew the pseudonym independently, all customers are required to renew their pseudonyms for every several days and the renewal procedure is conducted coordinately, which makes sure the pseudonyms getting renewed in time and also minimizes the information an attacker can get during the process. The scheme is proven to be secure in theory and the computational costs in main steps of this scheme are given. All show that the scheme proposed is effective.