Data Protection in a Cloud-Enabled Smart Grid

Today’s electricity grid is evolving into the smart grid which ought to be reliable, flexible, efficient, and sustainable. To fulfill these requirements, the smart grid draws on a plenty of core technologies. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). These technologies facilitate easy and fast accumulation of different data, e.g. fine-grained meter readings. Various security and privacy concerns w.r.t. the gathered data arise, since research has shown that it is possible to deduce and extract user behaviour from smart meter readings. Hence, these meter readings are very sensitive and require appropriate protection. Unlike other data protection approaches that are primarily based on data obfuscation and data encryption, we introduce a usage control based data protection mechanism for the smart grid. We show how the concept of distributed data usage control can be integrated with smart grid services and concretize this approach for an energy marketplace that runs on a cloud platform for performance, scalability, and economic reasons.