Multi-resolution privacy-enhancing technologies for smart metering

The availability of individual load profiles per household in the smart grid end-user domain combined with non-intrusive load monitoring to infer personal data from these load curves has led to privacy concerns. Privacy-enhancing technologies have been proposed to address these concerns. In this paper, the extension of privacy-enhancing technologies by wavelet-based multi-resolution analysis (MRA) is proposed to enhance the options available on the user side. For three types of privacy methods (secure aggregation, masking and differential privacy), we show that MRA not only enhances privacy, but also adds additional flexibility and control for the end-user. The combination of MRA and PETs is evaluated in terms of privacy, computational demands, and real-world feasibility for each of the three method types. © 2017, The Author(s).