International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology Volume 70 Issue 9, 337-345, September 2022
ISSN: 2231 – 5381 / https://doi.org/10.14445/22315381/IJETT-V70I9P233 © 2022 Seventh Sense Research Group®
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Original Article
Cyber-Resilient Privacy Preservation and Secure
Billing Approach for Smart Energy Metering Devices
M. Venkatesh Kumar1, C. Lakshmi2
1,2Department of CSE, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, Tamilnadu. India.
1Corresponding Author : veenkat@gmail.com
Received: 11 May 2022 Revised: 12 July 2022 Accepted: 20 September 2022 Published: 30 September 2022
Abstract - Most of the smart applications, such as smart energy metering devices, demand strong privacy preservation to
strengthen data privacy. However, it is difficult to protect the privacy of the smart device data, especially on the client side.
It is mainly because payment for billing is computed by the server deployed at the client's side, and it is highly challenging
to prevent the leakage of client's information to unauthorised users. Various researchers have discussed this problem and
have proposed different privacy preservation techniques. Conventional techniques suffer from the problem of high
computational and communication overload on the client side. In addition, the performance of these techniques
deteriorates due to computational complexity and their inability to handle the security of large-scale data. Due to these
limitations, it becomes easy for the attackers to introduce malicious attacks on the server, posing a significant threat to
data security. In this context, this proposal intends to design novel privacy preservation and secure billing framework
using deep learning techniques to ensure data security in smart energy metering devices. This research aims to overcome
the limitations of the existing techniques to achieve robust privacy preservation in smart devices and increase the cyber
resilience of these devices.
Keywords - Cyber Resilient, Data mining, Data Security, Privacy Preservation, Smart Metering.
1. Introduction
Most of the real-time smart applications such as data
sharing, smart grid systems, smart energy devices etc. can
be simulated using a fundamental client-server structure
where the client connects with the server to send requests
and receive requested services from the services (De
Craemer&Deconinck, 2010) [1]. This architecture also
allows the clients to pay for the received services. For
instance, smart devices allow users to contact the
centralised server through their smart gadgets to obtain
relevant knowledge. Applications like smart metering also
follow a basic client-server system wherein smart meters
are deployed on the user's side to collect the electricity
usage data (Arun & Mohit, 2016) [2]. This data will be
further communicated to the electrical companies via
servers (deployed on the company's side). This process of
data sharing is more vulnerable to cyber attacks since the
data sent from the client to the server can expose sensitive
user data, such as the user's private information, to
unauthorised entities (Cheng et al., 2018) [3]. The
attackers can exploit sensitive information such as the
user's identity and financial data to find out the preferences
of the users (Chim et al., 2012) [4] (Li et al., 2015) [5]
(Xing et al., 2017) [6]. Readings from smart meters may be
analysed to determine whether or not a user is there, and
this information can be dangerous. (Garcia &Jacobs, 2010)
[7] Since they can trigger security and safety concerns of
the users. In such cases, privacy preservation becomes a
crucial tool in smart metering devices. In addition, the
payment made by the client (electricity bill) to the energy
companies via a server is also exposed to cyber-attacks.
Hence it is essential to maintain the client's privacy and
secure the billing information using privacy preservation
techniques. Conventional cryptographic techniques were
used in various research works for privacy preservation in
smart energy metering devices (Li et al., 2014) [8] (Yao et
al., 2019) [9] (Syed et al., 2020) [10]. However, these
techniques suffer from certain problems which restrict
their adaptability. These techniques suffer from high
computational overhead and are not feasible for smart
applications (Paulet et al., 2013) [11] (Huang et al., 2014)
[12] (Chen et al., 2019) [13]. Also, it is highly difficult to
hide clients' information from unauthorised users when
they communicate through the servers since the requests
and payments made by the clients follow a traditional
billing process.
In this process, the server computes the bills based on
the utilised service, and the information about the payment
made by the client is easily accessible. It increases security
problems (Molina-Markham et al., 2012) [14] (Alhothaily
et al., 2017) [15]. Most of the existing privacy preservation
techniques for smart metering (Erkin et al., 2013) [16]
(Shen et al., 2017) [36] (Wang, 2017) [18] could not meet
the desired requirements for privacy preservation since
they compromise on the service quality for privacy
preservation.