Privacy Enforcement in a Cost-Effective Smart Grid

In this technical report we present the current state of the research conducted during the first part of the PhD period. The PhD thesis “Privacy Enforcement in a Cost-Effective Smart Grid” focuses on ensuring privacy when generating market for energy service providers that develop web services for the residential domain in the envisaged smart grid. The PhD project is funded and associated to the EU project “Energy Demand Aware Open Services for Smart Grid Intelligent Automation” (SmartHG) and therefore introduces the project on a system-level. Based on this, we present some of the integration, security and privacy challenges that emerge when designing a system architecture and infrastructure. The resulting architecture is a consumer-centric and agent-based design and uses open Internet-based communication protocols for enabling interoperability while being cost-effective. Finally, the PhD report presentthe envisaged future work and publications that will lead to completion of the PhD study

Securing the Home Energy Management Platform

Energy management in households gets increasingly more attention in the struggle to integrate more sustainable energy sources. Especially in the electrical system, smart grid systems are envisioned to be part in the efforts towards a better utilisation of the energy production and distribution infrastructure. The Home Energy Management System (HEMS) is a critical infrastructure component in this endeavour. Its main goal is to enable energy services utilising smart devices in the households based on the interest of the residential consumers and external actors. With the role of being both an essential link in the communication infrastructure for balancing the electrical grid and a surveillance unit in private homes, security and privacy become essential to address. In this chapter, we identify and address potential threats Home Energy Management Platform (HEMP) developers should consider in the progress of designing architecture, selecting hardware and building software. Our approach starts with a general view of the involved stakeholders and the HEMS. Given the system overview, a threat model is constructed from the HEMP developer\u27s point of view. Based on the threats that have been detected, possible mitigation strategies are proposed taking into account the state of the art of technology for securing platforms