Preserving Smart Grid Integrity: A Differential Privacy Framework for Secure Detection of False Data Injection Attacks in the Smart Grid

In this paper, we present a framework based on differential privacy (DP) for querying electric power measurements to detect system anomalies or bad data caused by false data injections (FDIs). Our DP approach conceals consumption and system matrix data, while simultaneously enabling an untrusted third party to test hypotheses of anomalies, such as an FDI attack, by releasing a randomized sufficient statistic for hypothesis-testing. We consider a measurement model corrupted by Gaussian noise and a sparse noise vector representing the attack, and we observe that the optimal test statistic is a chi-square random variable. To detect possible attacks, we propose a novel DP chi-square noise mechanism that ensures the test does not reveal private information about power injections or the system matrix. The proposed framework provides a robust solution for detecting FDIs while preserving the privacy of sensitive power system data.

Solar Photovoltaic Systems Metadata Inference and Differentially Private Publication

Stakeholders in electricity delivery infrastructure are amassing data about their system demand, use, and operations. Still, they are reluctant to share them, as even sharing aggregated or anonymized electric grid data risks the disclosure of sensitive information. This paper highlights how applying differential privacy to distributed energy resource production data can preserve the usefulness of that data for operations, planning, and research purposes without violating privacy constraints. Differentially private mechanisms can be optimized for queries of interest in the energy sector, with provable privacy and accuracy trade-offs, and can help design differentially private databases for further analysis and research. In this paper, we consider the problem of inference and publication of solar photovoltaic systems' metadata. Metadata such as nameplate capacity, surface azimuth and surface tilt may reveal personally identifiable information regarding the installation behind-the-meter. We describe a methodology to infer the metadata and propose a mechanism based on Bayesian optimization to publish the inferred metadata in a differentially private manner. The proposed mechanism is numerically validated using real-world solar power generation data.