A Privacy Model for Smart Metering

Electricity suppliers have started replacing traditional electricity meters with so-called smart meters, which can transmit current power consumption levels to the supplier within short intervals. Though this is advantageous for the electricity suppliers' planning purposes, and also allows the customers a more detailed look at their usage behavior, it means a considerable risk for privacy. The detailed information can be used to judge whether persons are in the household, when they come home, which electric devices they use (e.g. when they watch TV), and so forth. In this work, we introduce the "smart metering privacy model" for measuring the degree of privacy that a smart metering application can provide. Moreover, we present two design solutions both with and without involvement of trusted third parties. We show that the solution with trusted party can provide "perfect privacy" under certain conditions.