A privacy-enhancing protocol that provides in-network data aggregation and verifiable smart meter billing

We present an innovative protocol combining innetwork data aggregation and smart meter billing for a smart grid scenario. The former enables an energy supplier to allocate and balance resources. The latter provides dynamic pricing schemes according to fine-grained consumption profiles. Moreover, smart meters and their energy supplier can prove their billing values. Since the energy supplier knows the amount of generated electricity and the consolidated consumption in a round of measurements, the energy supplier can detect energy loss and fraud. To preserve customers´ privacy, we use a homomorphic commitment scheme with a homomorphic encryption scheme. All data sent from a meter to any other component in the communication network is either a commitment or an encrypted message. To provide security and privacy, we only require software modifications, leaving the hardware of the smart grid unchanged.