Privacy-Preserving and Outsourced Computation Framework for Power Usage Control in Smart Grids

The evolution of intelligent systems to effectively manage our energy services and mitigate climate change have made the adoption of smart grids crucial for a sustainable environment and economic growth. Although smart grid technology offers numerous benefits, such as improved reliability and efficient transmission of electricity, security threats remain a top concern for consumers and utility companies. In general, the confidentiality of the power consumption data collected by the utility companies is an important privacy concern for households. In this paper, we mainly focus on the power outage control problem in smart grids. When the total power usage from a given neighborhood exceeds a pre-defined threshold t, some or all of the households need to reduce their energy consumption to avoid power outage. This problem is referred to as the threshold-based power usage control (TPUC). In particular, we focus on solving the TPUC problem in a privacy-preserving manner. We emphasize that the existing secure TPUC algorithms are either insecure or inaccurate. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving and outsourced computation framework to address the TPUC problem based on Shamir's secret sharing scheme. We show that our solution always produces correct results. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves higher privacy and incurs significantly lower costs when compared with existing protocols.