Preserving privacy in a smart grid scenario using quantum mechanics

Studies on smart grid and quantum mechanics have potential to yield several benefits to society, with the former resulting in economic and environmental benefits and the latter providing perfect security and privacy at affordable costs. Recently, security and privacy have become important issues in electrical power grids. In this paper, we describe two quantum privacy-enhancing protocols: one of them requires that the parties initially share a certain amount of quantum entangled states, while the other uses only quantum key distribution methods without sharing quantum entangled states. The two proposed protocols are resistant to attacks from quantum computers. This paper also describes some recent advances of classical and quantum privacy-enhancing technologies. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.