A Practical Searchable Symmetric Encryption Scheme for Smart Grid Data

Outsourcing data storage to the remote cloud can be an economical solution to enhance data management in the smart grid ecosystem. To protect the privacy of data, the utility company may choose to encrypt the data before uploading them to the cloud. However, while encryption provides confidentiality to data, it also sacrifices the data owners' ability to query a special segment in their data. Searchable symmetric encryption is a technology that enables users to store documents in ciphertext form while keeping the functionality to search keywords in the documents. However, most state-of-the-art SSE algorithms are only focusing on general document storage, which may become unsuitable for smart grid applications. In this paper, we propose a simple, practical SSE scheme that aims to protect the privacy of data generated in the smart grid. Our scheme achieves high space complexity with small information disclosure that was acceptable for practical smart grid application. We also implement a prototype over the statistical data of advanced meter infrastructure to show the effectiveness of our approach

Data Collection in Smart Communities Using Sensor Cloud: Recent Advances, Taxonomy, and Future Research Directions

The remarkable miniaturization of sensors has led to the production of massive amounts of data in smart communities. These data cannot be efficiently collected and processed in WSNs due to the weak communication capability of these networks. This drawback can be compensated for by amalgamating WSNs and cloud computing to obtain sensor clouds. In this article, we investigate, highlight, and report recent premier advances in sensor clouds with respect to data collection. We categorize and classify the literature by devising a taxonomy based on important parameters, such as objectives, applications, communication technology, collection types, discovery, data types, and classification. Moreover, a few prominent use cases are presented to highlight the role of sensor clouds in providing high computation capabilities. Furthermore, several open research challenges and issues, such as big data issues, deployment issues, data security, data aggregation, dissemination of control message, and on time delivery are discussed. Future research directions are also provided

Weathering the Nest: Privacy Implications of Home Monitoring for the Aging American Population

The research in this paper will seek to ascertain the extent of personal data entry and collection required to enjoy at least the minimal promised benefits of distributed intelligence and monitoring in the home. Particular attention will be given to the abilities and sensitivities of the population most likely to need these devices, notably the elderly and disabled. The paper will then evaluate whether existing legal limitations on the collection, maintenance, and use of such data are applicable to devices currently in use in the home environment and whether such regulations effectively protect privacy. Finally, given appropriate policy parameters, the paper will offer proposals to effectuate reasonable and practical privacy-protective solutions for developers and consumers

System Design of Internet-of-Things for Residential Smart Grid

Internet-of-Things (IoTs) envisions to integrate, coordinate, communicate, and collaborate real-world objects in order to perform daily tasks in a more intelligent and efficient manner. To comprehend this vision, this paper studies the design of a large scale IoT system for smart grid application, which constitutes a large number of home users and has the requirement of fast response time. In particular, we focus on the messaging protocol of a universal IoT home gateway, where our cloud enabled system consists of a backend server, unified home gateway (UHG) at the end users, and user interface for mobile devices. We discuss the features of such IoT system to support a large scale deployment with a UHG and real-time residential smart grid applications. Based on the requirements, we design an IoT system using the XMPP protocol, and implemented in a testbed for energy management applications. To show the effectiveness of the designed testbed, we present some results using the proposed IoT architecture.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, journal pape