Information-Theoretic Privacy in Smart Meters

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• Giulio Giaconi (Imperial College London & British Telecommunications (BT))
• Friday 11 May 2018, 15:00-16:00
• Room 611 (Gabor Seminar Room), Level 6, EEE Department.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Joan P O'Brien.

Smart grids promise to enhance drastically the efficiency of today’s power networks. The smart meter is the key component of smart grids, as it allows to monitor a user’s electricity consumption with much higher accuracy and finer time resolution, compared to conventional energy meters. However, the high level of accuracy and resolution of smart meter measurements also entails serious privacy implications for the users. In fact, each power appliance owns a very peculiar power signature, which non-intrusive load monitoring techniques are able to distinguish from the aggregate household consumption. This knowledge may lead an attacker, which may be a thief, a surveillance agency, or the utility provider itself, to gain insights into users’ activities and behaviors. This talk aims at analyzing several privacy-preserving techniques that protect users’ privacy without diminishing the utility of the smart grid. We consider physical resources that are increasingly available at the users’ premises, such as renewable energy sources and rechargeable batteries, and use them to minimize the information leaked about a user’s electricity consumption, as well as the cost of energy. We deploy information-theoretic tools to characterize the fundamental limits of smart meter privacy for some limit scenarios, and we also propose more empirical privacy-preserving strategies, testing their performance against real smart meter measurements and time of use pricing tariffs. Results show the benefits of using physical resources to jointly optimize privacy and cost of energy.

This is a PhD Graduation Talk

Speaker Bio: Giulio Giaconi received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees (Hons.) in communications engineering from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2011 and 2013, respectively. He is a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, and a research scientist with British Telecommunications Research and Innovation, Security Futures Practice. In 2013, he was a Visiting Student with Imperial College London, working on indoor localization via visible light communications. His current research interests include data privacy, cybersecurity, information and communication theory, signal processing and machine learning. In 2014, he received the Excellent Graduate Student Award of the Sapienza University of Rome.

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