A Review of the Privacy-preserving Mechanisms of the Smart Meter in M2M

The relation between the Internet of things and people is increasingly closed, especially M2M technologies develop rapidly. As one of the most important applications in M2M, the smart meter has been widely spread for its convenience and intelligence. Because the user’s privacy data information is held in smart meter which can be attacked by eavesdropping and tampering, the requirement of privacy-preserving is indispensable. In this paper, after summarizing major privacy-preserving schemes to date, we classify these privacy-preserving schemes as external privacy-preserving schemes and internal privacy-preserving schemes according to the corresponding privacy attacks. The major part of external privacy-preserving schemes is the anonymous data transmission. The k-anonymity, l-anonymity and t-anonymity are proposed to achieve the goal of transmitting data anonymously to resist their corresponding privacy attacks. The internal privacy-preserving schemes involve access control and permission of authentication. Access control gives different users different permission; permission of authentication identifies the user’s permission and resists the force attack. Due to the uncertainty of the background knowledge which is the main attack scheme attackers depend on, we cannot prevent the privacy information from being revealed, namely, there is no perfect scheme to resist all the privacy attacks, existing privacy-preserving schemes are all proposed under a given environment of application.