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To address recently emerging concerns on privacy violations, this paper investigates possible sensitive information leakages and analyzes potential privacy threats in the automatic appliance control (AAC) application, which is one of the handiest applications in smart grids and one of the earliest examples in Internet of Things (IoT). Without an effective and consistent privacy preservation mechanism, the adversary can capture, model, and divulge customers' behavior, activities, and personal information at almost every level of society. Based on a set of existing cryptographic primitives, we propose an attribute-based encryption (ABE) key management variant and we also design and implement a fine-grained protocol named privacy preservation protocol (P3). We further present a practical automatic appliance control (AAC) system based on that protocol, and shows that it can fulfill the smart grid's requirements in privacy preservation. Experimental results demonstrate that our protocol merely incurs a substantially light overhead on the AAC application, yet is able to address and solve the formidable privacy challenges both customers and utility companies are facing.
Li et al. (2014) studied this question.