Blind processing: Securing data against system administrators

Multi-owner systems such as power grid need information from all parties to operate efficiently. However, in general, information sharing is limited by market and other constraints. In addition, the emerging problem of demand side management in distribution systems as a part of “smarter grid” efforts, secure communication and execution between the utilities and the customers is required to ensure the privacy. In this paper, we propose blind processing, a novel communication and execution approach for entities that compete with each other but need to cooperate for the overall good of the system. Our goal is to allow information exchange between system components with protection mechanisms against everyone including system administrators. Shielding information will prevent gaining access to the sensitive data while providing a complete picture of the whole system in computations. Such a security mechanism can be provided by employing the functionality of Trusted Computing, a security technology that utilizes hardware and software modules to improve the trustworthiness of a system.