A Special Session on “Security and Privacy Technologies for Intelligent Energy Networks” has been hosted by the research center together with TU Delft at ACM Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IHMMSEC) 2014. Three contributions were presented, dealing with privacy in smart metering and security management in smart grids.

For our research center, Günther Eibl presented a paper discussing the relation of measurement interval in smart metering and privacy-sensitive information. Currently smart meters are beeing installed in Austria. Data privacy specialists have warned that personal information can be extracted with use of smart meters. However, existing scientific studies to smart meter privacy usually consider measurements performed with short time intervals such as a few seconds. It is still unclear what information can be obtained from longer time intervals like the planned quarter-hour values. The research team at Josef Ressel Zentrum has carried out first studies in this direction. It was shown that switching on and off short-use equipment can no longer be detected in longer time intervals. With a time interval of 15 Minutes, switching operations of lights can still be detected, whereas typically used houshold appliances like a microwave oven, water heater or hairdryer can no longer be consistently detected.

• G. Eibl and D. Engel, “Influence of Data Granularity on Nonintrusive Appliance Load Monitoring,” in Proceedings of the Second ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec ’14), Salzburg, Austria, 2014, p. 147–151.
  [Bibtex]

  @InProceedings{Eibl14a,
  author = {G\"{u}nther Eibl and Dominik Engel},
  title = {Influence of Data Granularity on Nonintrusive Appliance Load Monitoring},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH\&MMSec '14)},
  year = {2014},
  pages = {147--151},
  address = {Salzburg, Austria},
  publisher = {ACM},
  doi = {10.1145/2600918.2600920},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-2647-6},
  location = {Salzburg, Austria},
  numpages = {5},
  pdf = {http://www.en-trust.at/papers/Eibl14a.pdf},
  publisher-address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2600918.2600920},
  }