Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Payment Mechanism for Smart Grids

Smart grids have become a future trend due to the development of technology and increased energy demand and consumption. In smart grids, a user’s electricity consumption is recorded by their smart meters, and the smart meters submit the data to the operation center in each time unit for monitoring. The operation center analyzes the data it receives to estimate user’s electricity usage in the next time unit and to ensure dynamic energy distribution. Compared to traditional grids, the electricity can be flexibly controlled, and waste is decreased in smart grids. However, details of user’s daily lives may be leaked out through the frequent monitoring of user’s electricity usage, which causes the problem of privacy preserving. To solve the problem, data aggregation mechanisms are adopted in this environment. The power usage data in the same units are aggregated before being sent to the operation center. This aggregation prevents personal electricity usage data from being shared with the operation center. Thus, a user’s privacy is protected. Along with the increase in the number of research studies on smart grids, many studies on the privacy-preserving issues of power usage have been published. However, both power usage data and electricity payment data may jeopardize user’s privacy. The operation center is able to obtain user’s private information by analyzing a user’s electricity payments. Therefore, we propose a verifiable privacy-preserving payment mechanism for smart grids. In our scheme, users can submit electricity payments without revealing any private information and the operation center can verify the correctness of the payment.