P2DR: Privacy-preserving demand response system in smart grids

Demand response programs are widely used to balance the supply and the demand in smart grids. They result in a reliable electric power system. Unfortunately, the privacy violation is a pressing challenge and increasingly affects the demand response programs because of the fact that power usage and operational data can be misused to infer personal information of customers. Without a consistent privacy preservation mechanism, adversaries can capture, model and divulge customers' behavior and activities at almost every level of society. This paper investigates a set of new privacy threat models focusing on financial rationality verse inconvenience. Furthermore, we design and implement a privacy protection protocol based on attributed-based encryptions. To demonstrate its feasibility, the protocol is adopted in several kinds of demand response programs. Real-world experiments show that our scheme merely incurs a substantially light overhead, but can address the formidable privacy challenges that customers are facing in demand response systems.