Title
Preventing Occupancy Detection From Smart Meters
Abstract
Utilities are rapidly deploying smart meters that measure electricity usage in real-time. Unfortunately, smart meters indirectly leak sensitive information about a home's occupancy, which is easy to detect because it highly correlates with simple statistical metrics, such as power's mean, variance, and range. To prevent occupancy detection, we propose using the thermal energy storage of electric water heaters already present in many homes. In essence, our approach, which we call combined heat and privacy (CHPr), modulates a water heater's power usage to make it look like someone is always home. We design a CHPr-enabled water heater that regulates its energy usage to thwart a variety of occupancy detection attacks without violating its objective---to provide hot water on demand---and evaluate it in simulation using real data. Our results show that a standard 50-gal CHPr-enabled water heater prevents a wide range of state-of-the-art occupancy detection attacks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/TSG.2015.2402224
IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
Keywords
Field
DocType
Data privacy, Internet of things, smart grids
Thermal energy storage,Thermal energy,Metre,Electricity,Occupancy,Cogeneration,Engineering,Information sensitivity,Embedded system,Power usage
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
PP
99
1949-3053
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.71
15
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dong Chen1373.03
Sandeep Kalra2110.71
David E. Irwin389998.12
Prashant J. Shenoy46386521.30
Jeannie R. Albrecht5262.50