Data Security and Privacy in Smart Grid

This dissertation explores novel data security and privacy problems in the emerging smart grid.

The need for data security and privacy spans the whole life cycle of the data in the smart grid, across the phases of data acquisition, local processing and archiving, collaborative processing, and finally sharing and archiving. The first two phases happen in the private domains of an individual utility company, where data are collected from the power system and processed at the local facilities. When data are being acquired and processed in the private domain, data security is the most critical concern. The key question is how to ensure the data availability and integrity for their uses in the private domain and later in the public space. Hence, we devote Chapter 2 to the vulnerability assessment of the phasor network, which deals with the data security in the private domain.

After the initial two phases, some of the data enter the public space. In the public space, data privacy is another challenging requirement on top of data security. We select three aspects of data privacy issues in the smart grid to illustrate the how the new technologies like cloud computing, homomorphic encryption, and advanced cryptography can form a synergy to solve these problems. Chapter 3 introduces a solution of secure outsourcing of dynamic simulations leveraging cloud computing; Chapter 4 presents a multiparty privacy-preserving spectrum estimation; Chapter 5 put forward a new mechanism for secure storage and sharing of power flow data for situational awareness.