A Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Incentive-Based Demand Response in the Smart Grid

The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in the smart grid provides real-time information to both grid operators and customers, exploiting the full potential of demand response (DR). However, it introduces new privacy threats to customers. Prior works have proposed privacy-preserving methods in the AMI, such as temporal or spatial aggregation. A main assumption in these works is that fine-grained data do not need to be attributable to individuals. However, this assumption does not hold in incentive-based demand response (IDR) programs where fine-grained metering data are required to analyze individual demand curtailments, and hence, need to be attributable. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving scheme for IDR programs in the smart grid, which enables the DR provider to compute individual demand curtailments and DR rewards while preserving customer privacy. Moreover, a customer can reveal his/her identity and prove ownership of his/her power usage profile in certain situations, such as legal disputes. We achieve both privacy and efficiency in our scheme through a combination of several cryptographic primitives, such as identity-committable signatures and partially blind signatures. As far as we know, we are the first to identify and address privacy issues for IDR programs in the smart grid.