Secure Data Collection in Constrained Tree-Based Smart Grid Environments

To facilitate more efficient control, massive amounts of sensors or measurement devices will be deployed in the Smart Grid. Data collection then becomes non-trivial. In this paper, we study the scenario where a data collector is responsible for collecting data from multiple measurement devices, but only some of them can communicate with the data collector directly. Others have to rely on other devices to relay the data. We first develop a communication protocol so that the data reported by each device is protected again honest-but-curious data collector and devices. To reduce the time to collect data from all devices within a certain security level, we formulate our approach as an integer linear programming problem. As the problem is NP-hard, obtaining the optimal solution in a large network is not very feasible. We thus develop an approximation algorithm to solve the problem. We test the performance of our algorithm using real topologies. The results show that our algorithm successfully identifies good solutions within reasonable amount of time.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111643/1/Uludag_IEEE_SGC_14.pd

Techniques, Taxonomy, and Challenges of Privacy Protection in the Smart Grid

As the ease with which any data are collected and transmitted increases, more privacy concerns arise leading to an increasing need to protect and preserve it. Much of the recent high-profile coverage of data mishandling and public mis- leadings about various aspects of privacy exasperates the severity. The Smart Grid (SG) is no exception with its key characteristics aimed at supporting bi-directional information flow between the consumer of electricity and the utility provider. What makes the SG privacy even more challenging and intriguing is the fact that the very success of the initiative depends on the expanded data generation, sharing, and pro- cessing. In particular, the deployment of smart meters whereby energy consumption information can easily be collected leads to major public hesitations about the tech- nology. Thus, to successfully transition from the traditional Power Grid to the SG of the future, public concerns about their privacy must be explicitly addressed and fears must be allayed. Along these lines, this chapter introduces some of the privacy issues and problems in the domain of the SG, develops a unique taxonomy of some of the recently proposed privacy protecting solutions as well as some if the future privacy challenges that must be addressed in the future.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111644/1/Uludag2015SG-privacy_book-chapter.pd

Secure Minimum Time Data Collection (SMTDC) protocol for wireless sensor networks

Recent work has shown that a mobile data collector moving along a predefined trajectory can improve the real-time data collection duration and efficiency in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Due to the fixed trajectory and limited communication range, data collection is conducted using a many-to-one communication pattern known as convergecast. However, because of the confidentiality concern of data being transmitted, security issues such as security key leakage, eavesdropping, and malicious attack raise significant challenges in minimizing the data collection time. To address this issue, we present the design and implementation of the Secure Minimum Time Data Collection (SMTDC) protocol, a tree formulated, and time-scheduled protocol for large scale, stationary, hardware-limited WSN. SMTDC can cooperate with many existing security communication frameworks. During the tree formation phase of SMTDC, we build well-balanced optimized trees that have the potential for minimum data collection time. We formulate our approach as an integer linear programming problem and solve it using linear relaxation based iterative rounding (LR-IR). During the time scheduling phase of SMTDC, we use a heuristic time-slot arrangement algorithm to solve the tree scheduling problem. The proposed algorithms and schemes are validated through simulation experiments using GUROBI solver and OMNET++ under realistic WSN topology. The result shows that SMTDC tree formation outperforms other algorithms in building a more effectively secure and load-balanced tree, and SMTDC scheduling significantly improves the data collection time over pre-generated tree topology