Data Privacy Preservation and Security in Smart Metering Systems

One of the most important questions about smart metering systems for the end users is their data privacy and security. Indeed, smart metering systems provide a lot of advantages for distribution system operators (DSO), but functionalities offered to users of existing smart meters are still limited and society is becoming increasingly critical. Smart metering systems are accused of interfering with personal rights and privacy, providing unclear tariff regulations which not sufficiently encourage households to manage their electricity consumption in advance. In the specific field of smart grids, data security appears to be a necessary condition for consumer confidence without which they will not be able to give their consent to the collection and use of personal data concerning them.

Cross-border energy trading activity via interconnection has received much attention in Southern Asia to help the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region’s energy deficit states. This research article proposed a smart metering system to reduce energy losses and increase distribution sector efficiency. The implementation of smart metering systems in utility management plays a pivotal role in advancing several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), i.e.; SDG (Affordable and Clean Energy), and SDG Climate Action. By enabling real-time monitoring, accurate measurement, and data-driven management of energy resources, smart meters promote efficient consumption, reduce losses, and encourage sustainable behaviors among consumers. The adoption of a smart metering system along with Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis, socio-economic analysis, current challenges, and future prospects was also investigated. Besides the economics of the electrical distribution system, one feeder with non-technical losses of about 16% was selected, and the cost–benefit analysis and cost–benefit ratio was estimated for the SAARC region. The import/export ratio is disturbing in various SAARC grids, and a solution in terms of community microgrids is presented from Pakistan’s perspective as a case study. The proposed work gives a guidelines for SAARC countries to reduce their losses and improve their system functionality. It gives a composite solution across multi-faceted evaluation for the betterment of a large region.

This paper describes the importance of the interoperability in smart metering systems for modern distribution system operators. The lack of interoperability significantly increases the costs of smart metering system implementation for distribution system operators, especially the costs of purchasing new equipment. The replacement, cleanup and maintenance of electricity meters produced by different manufacturers, which are not interoperable, are also much more complex and expensive. Furthermore, without the interoperability, the system cannot be observable, i.e. the observability exists only for some particular segments of the system. This prevents many functionalities of distribution management system. In terms of interoperability, smart metering systems have gone through four different stages. A comparison of the system implementation costs for these four stages is presented for distribution system operator of Serbia.

Smart metering systems are electronic systems that measure the electricity consumption, ensuring a secure two-way transmission of information to the end customer and providing more information than a conventional meter, using electronic communication. This type of smart metering technologies has been implemented in three pilot projects from a Romanian region, in order to ensure the collection, analysis and processing of electricity specific data, as well as the connection/disconnection of each consumer. The implementation of smart meters in the three pilot areas led to a more accurate recording of final electricity consumption and a detailed monitoring of the electricity consumption by types of consumption profiles, as well as the electricity technical power losses (ETL) indicator. This paper aims to analyze the evolution of electricity technical losses registered by smart metering systems in each of the three pilot projects and also for the whole region in a certain period, in order to demonstrate the need and importance of monitoring this type of power losses and to find the best methods to reduce them, using smart metering. The results showed that the cost of electricity for the technical power losses in the chosen area is very high. In order to reduce these costs, a number of measures for ETL optimization and reduction were proposed.

In the world of evolving technologies the energy like solar or electricity and utilities industry, plays major role includes smart meters and smart grids, which provides companies with exceptional capabilities for forecasting demand, determining customer usage patterns, preventing outages, minimizing the loss and more. Advances in technologies and its usage generates unprecedented data volume, speed and complexity which should be preserved securely for later usage for accurate predictions. Managing the large volume information generated by short-interval reads of smart meter data by various smart devices is a challenge for existing IT resources in storing them and also ensuring the privacy of sensitive customer meter data is also a major issue in smart meter deployments. Security should be provided for data which is stored at data centers at cloud and also at local energy distributer centers at two tiers. In this paper we focus on security regarding storage of big data at data centres as well as at local distribution such as databases. So we propose MDET (Multiple Data Encryption Technique) which allows encryption of each record two times at storage centres by using Generator based encryption technique. In this technique the data in the database is encrypted twice so that the data record should be decrypted once at data centre as well as at the local distribution centre by private keys at two levels so that privacy of consumer data is not lost at either data storage centre at cloud or at local distribution centre.

Reducing the power supply-demand gap and increasing reliability of power supply are the challenges of current energy management. Implementation of smart grid, smart meters and smart metering can be a possible solution for power demand reduction, efficient power supply management, and optimization of management resource usages. Smart meters include sophisticated measurement and calculation hardware, software, calibration and communication capabilities. For interoperability within a smart grid infrastructure, smart meters are designed to perform functions, and store and communicate data according to certain standards. In this work we discuss smart meter and various elements of smart metering, current state of the technologies related to smart grid, smart meter, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and meter data flow in smart grid. We also discuss standards related to smart meter, meter data format and data transmission, functions of smart meter, and functionalities of smart meters, currently deployed by utilities around the world.

Smart metering systems obtain fine-grained consumption data of their users. This allows for effective load balancing, but at the same time threatens consumers' privacy. Since the electricity provider only needs the characteristics of a region, not individuals, approaches like one by Marmol et al. suggest to aggregate data to protect consumer privacy. However, an implementation of such an approach also has to consider the legal and regulatory situation. In Germany, the technical guideline TR-03109 issued by the Federal Office for Information Security specifies demands which have to be fulfilled so that a smart meter gateway can be certified for use. These specifications imply limitations to the protocol design. Within this paper, we discuss the applicability of the method presented by Marmol et al. under consideration of the German Smart Metering guideline. Where conformity is not given, we offer a solution to overcome these restrictions by adapting their method and introduce a third party aggregator who does not have to be trusted. Our method comes with additional communication effort but behaves well in terms of memory and computational overhead. The achieved privacy level outreaches a purely pseudonymous value transmission. Also it does not contradict the postulations of TR-03109, making it an applicable choice for privacy protection in real-world smart metering systems.

Secured gateway based communication in heterogeneous SM –neighbourhood area network in smart grid using FPGA design

Renewable energy (RE) sources play an important role that not only reduces the pressure on fossil fuels but also produces safe and clean energy by developing the microgrid (MG) technology that fulfills the excess demand for power throughout the world. The technological development and the blessing of information and communication technology converts the MG technology to a smarter one, termed as smart grid (SG) and virtual power plant, by establishing a two‐way communication between the consumers and service provider with the aid of smart metering infrastructure, dynamic pricing scheme, energy management system, smart transmission and distribution system. The transformation of the traditional power system to SG enhances the efficiency, flexibility, resiliency, and robustness of the power system due to the increasing level of cyber security and automation. A directional pathway from conventional to smart power system has been carried out in this paper by addressing the present status of the power system, challenges during the operations, and possible solutions. Initially, the control operation of MG with RE and energy storage system has been investigated which is essential to understand the operation complexity and challenges due to the variable nature of the RE, load dynamics, and uncertainties. But the facilities of end‐user feedback, dynamic pricing scheme, cyber security, and smart metering system are not present in MG technology that hampers the proper regulation of controlling operation, generating and distributing energy as well as energy losses. The development of SG with smart technologies overcomes these problems by proper controlling of power usage. Finally, this paper provides a path to move the MG toward SG by analyzing the technical and critical challenges of smart devices, equipment integration, and their control issues and provides possible solutions to overcome the integration and control challenges for a reliable and sustainable operation.

Smart metering is a subject that attracts much more attention. Smart metering is obtaining many benefits in a lot of aspects. Many smart metering projects are going on many countries, such as UK, Italy, the USA and other countries. Some planning studies list in this paper show that smart metering is technically feasible. Many benefits are available, especially on improving the energy efficiency. The future smart metering system will rely on policies and governmental fiscal stimuli. However cyber security requirement will be an issue. Smart metering deserves a big attention.

Advanced smart meters generate meter readings in a time unit less than a second. Fine-grained meter readings enable various smart grid applications, such as load monitoring, automatic billing, and power generation planning. However, those meter readings threaten individuals' privacy by revealing details of one's daily activities. The time granularity of smart meters is often much finer than the one a smart grid application demands. Thus, the storage and access control mechanisms of meter readings are critical to balancing privacy requirements and application functionalities. Previous studies address the issue by considering a locally trusted storage device and using cryptographic primitives. We consider a storage outsourcing scenario, where the external storage environment is semi-trusted. We construct a privacy preserving metering system by using a trusted platform module in a smart meter and pseudorandom number generators inside the module. Our system guarantees the secure storage of meter readings and supports multiple time granularities. In our system, a user grants a service provider an access right over meter readings at a time granularity S. The granted service provider is only allowed to get the power consumption at a time unit of the granted time granularity. Our system provides a simple yet very practical solution to the privacy preserving smart metering system. Moreover, we provide a privacy model to capture the privacy requirement and show that our system is privacy preserving against honest-but-curious service providers.

Smart metering systems often utilize Power Line Communication (PLC) for bidirectional data exchange between smart energy meters and data concentrators. Electromagnetic interference generated by power electronic converters have been found as a main cause of communication errors in PLC data transmission. In this paper novel, modified pseudo-random pulse width modulation technique was developed to significantly reduce PLC frame error rate caused by interference generated by power electronic converters. Moreover, cyber–physical system has been presented as a case study providing high flexibility in controlling the switching rate of change of the modulation. As a general contribution, in the paper has been proposed the concept of electromagnetic interference noise shaping to broaden the possibility of preventing and mitigating non-compatibility scenarios between power electronic converters and telecommunications devices. The experimental results might be useful for system integrators involved in assurance of electromagnetic compatibility of power electronic interfaces and PLC based smart metering systems.

Fog-enabled secure multiparty computation based aggregation scheme in smart grid

In smart power grids, the utilization of computational infrastructures, advanced communication protocols, and automated metering systems (AMI) has led to increased efficiency and optimized energy consumption management. However, due to their heavy reliance on digital communications and the processing of large volumes of data, these grids are exposed to numerous security threats such as data tampering, unauthorized access, and measurement data manipulation. One of the most critical security threats in this domain is electricity theft through measurement data alteration or interference with smart metering systems. This paper presents a pattern recognition-based approach to enhance the accuracy of electricity theft detection in smart grids. The proposed method consists of two stages: In the first stage, anomaly detection in measurement data is performed using four base classifiers, including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Decision Trees (DT), and the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm. In the second stage, the outputs of these classifiers are combined using the AdaBoost ensemble algorithm to improve detection accuracy. The proposed method is implemented in the MATLAB 2022b environment and evaluated on the CER dataset. The results indicate that the AdaBoost algorithm achieved the best results across various metrics, including accuracy (93.75%), recall (94.01%), and F -measure (93.84%). Additionally, in terms of the false positive rate (FPR), the AdaBoost algorithm demonstrated a favorable performance with a rate of $\mathbf{5. 9 2 \%}$, indicating its strong ability to correctly identify normal samples.

The smart meters in electricity grids enable fine-grained consumption monitoring. Thus, suppliers could adjust their tariffs. However, as smart meters are deployed within the smart grid field, authentication and key establishment between smart grid parties (smart meters, aggregators, and servers) become an urgency. Besides, as privacy is becoming a big concern for smart meters, smart grid parties are reluctant to leak their real identities during the authentication phase. In this paper, we analyze the recent authentication schemes in smart grids and other applied fields, and propose an anonymous authentication and key establishment scheme between smart grid parties: FAuth. The proposed scheme is based on bilinear maps and the computational Diffie–Hellman problem. We changed the way the smart meter parties registered at Key Generation Center, making the proposed scheme robust against various potential attacks that could be launched by the Key Generation Center, as the scheme could avoid the private key of the smart meter parties from leaking to the Key Generation Center. Besides, the proposed scheme reduced the computational load, both at the smart meter side and at the aggregator side, which make it perfectly suitable for computation-constrained devices. Security proof results show the proposed scheme is secure under the BAN logic and random oracle model.