Privacy-preserving electricity billing system using functional encryption^†

The development of smart meters that can frequently measure and report power consumption has enabledelectricity providers to offer various time-varying rates, including time-of-use and real-time pricing plans. High-resolution power consumption data, however, raise serious privacy concerns because sensitive information regarding an individual’s lifestyle can be revealed by analyzing these data. Although extensive research has been conducted to address these privacy concerns, previous approaches have reduced the quality of measured data. In this paper, we propose a new privacy-preserving electricity billing method that does not sacrifice data quality for privacy. The proposed method is based on the novel use of functional encryption. Experimental results on a prototype system using a real-world smart meter device and data prove the feasibility of the proposed method.