Date of Award

1-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

College/School

College of Science and Mathematics

Department/Program

Computer Science

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Bharath Kumar Samanthula

Committee Member

Boxiang Dong

Committee Member

Vaibhav Anu

Abstract

Due to the numerous advantages of smart grids like reliability, availability, and efficiency, it has been emerging as an extraordinary contribution to the economic and environmental health. This project mainly focuses on the power outage issue in a smart grid environment. Power outages occur when electricity demand exceeds the supply, more specifically, consider a utility company which sets a threshold on the total power usage of households from a neighborhood. Whenever the total power usage from a neighborhood exceeds the threshold, some of the households needs to reduce their energy consumption; to avoid the power outage. This problem is referred to as the threshold-based power usage control (TPUC). The two-way communications of the smart grids and meters reflects how we use electricity which is sent to the utility company helping to resolve the power outages issue. However, solving the TPUC problem raises the privacy concerns since the utility company can profile the daily activities of a user, based on the energy consumption patterns. We emphasize that the existing privacy preserving algorithms are either insecure or inefficient and some of them also lack the correctness. Therefore, to prevent the power outage issue without violating the privacy of the households in the neighborhood, we use Shamir’s secret sharing. Our secret division algorithm involves the servers performing required computations on the randomized shares, which protects the privacy of the households in a neighborhood. Furthermore, our proposed protocols are secure and efficient compared to the existing privacy-preserving protocols. Our unique division algorithm allows the households to perform the division on the secret shares to preserve privacy along with a decrease in the computation cost making the protocol more efficient.

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