Enhanced Network Coding to Maintain Privacy in Smart Grid Communication

Hasen Nicanfar,Amr Alasaad,Victor C M Leung,Peyman Talebifard

doi:10.1109/tetc.2013.2288275

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are aimed at combining the physical system with the cyber ones to provide a better control and improve the management of physical systems around us. Recently, the CPS and its applications, e.g., health-care and smart grid, have gained attention of the research community. In this paper, we consider the privacy aspect of users in a CPS, particularly in smart grid system as our use-case, and provide a mechanism that utilizes the advances in network coding to maintain data privacy. We address privacy issues associated with gathering metering information of clients in a smart grid system. In smart grid systems, wireless multi-hop communications are mainly used to gather metering information through exchanging data and control messages between smart meters and the utility. We argue that any communication paradigm used in a smart grid should support all aspects of privacy such as anonymity, unlinkability, unobservablity, and undetectablity. We propose innovative schemes for traffic routing and encryption that benefit from the enhanced network coding technology. Our analysis shows that our schemes maintain privacy of users despite the possibility of detecting metering data by an adversary. In addition, our scheme has extra favorable features such as less computation complexity, reliable, and robust communication.

Highlights

Rapid developments in the computer science, and information and communication technology along with the control advances in physical systems have emerged into a new direction of multi-disciplinary engineering systems called CyberPhysical Systems (CPS) [2]–[4]
We focus on the privacy aspect of the smart grid in this paper
Since source and destination addresses are encrypted inside the header, our scheme delivers the anonymity and undetectability, which yields to unobservability

Summary

Introduction

Rapid developments in the computer science, and information and communication technology along with the control advances in physical systems have emerged into a new direction of multi-disciplinary engineering systems called CyberPhysical Systems (CPS) [2]–[4]. This revolutionary section of the science enables humans to interact with and control the environment more efficiently and effectively. Bob Blakley defines privacy as ‘‘The ability to lie about yourself and get away with it’’ [20], or ‘‘The right to be left alone’’. There are two defined forms for the anonymity: Sender Anonymity and Receiver Anonymity

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion