Smart Meter Privacy via the Trapdoor Channel

Abstract

A battery charging policy that provides privacy guarantees for smart meter systems with finite capacity battery is proposed. For this policy an upper bound on the information leakage rate is provided. The upper bound applies for general random processes modelling the energy consumption of the user. It is shown that the average energy consumption of the user determines the information leakage rate to the utility provider. The upper bound is shown to be tight by deriving the probability law of a random process achieving the bound.