Neighborhood Watch: What Your Utility Meter May Be Saying About You

摘要

The smart grid promises efficient and effective use of gas, water, and electric resources via the deployment of smart meters and advanced metering infrastructure. Smart meters aim to provide real-time usage information to central providers and to support autonomous control in order to facilitate desirable features such as demand response, demand forecasting, and flow monitoring. Much research has focused on the privacy and security of such a system (Rial & Danezis, 2011; Khurana et al, 2010; NIST, 2010; McDaniel & McLaughlin, 2009); the control of utilities should not be open to unauthenticated parties, and fine-grained energy use data can reveal a surprising amount about user activities. Greveler and Justus (2012) determined that sufficiently fine-grained energy-use data can be used to infer details from home-presence down to specific appliance activity and even the television channel being watched.