Abstract:
Despite the potential benefits of smart meters as part
of the Smart Grid initiative, the deployment of smart meters
has aroused several concerns on consumer privacy. To address
such concerns, various solutions are proposed in recent years
under a variety of assumptions. Nonetheless, all of these solutions
require a trust relationship between the consumers and utilities
or third-party service providers which still does not convince
some of the consumers for using smart meters. An ultimate
solution is to hide the data from utilities or third-parties by using
fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) systems while still allowing
them to do processing on the encrypted data for their needs.
However, the FHE systems are recently started to be realized
and their wider deployment for certain applications has not been
explored yet. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using
FHE systems on an IEEE 802.11s-based Advanced Metering
Infrastructure (AMI) application when preserving the privacy
of the consumers. We design and adapt one of the existing
FHE schemes for AMI and test its overhead under a variety
of conditions on an 802.11s-based wireless mesh network using
ns-3 network simulator. Compared to traditional encryption and
partially homomorphic systems, FHE comes with significant
overhead in terms of data size and delay. Nevertheless, the results
indicate that such delay and data size overhead are still in
acceptable limits that can be handled by the existing meters
and networks.
