Fabian Knirsch presented our joint work on smart grid privacy with University of Southern California at ICISSP, the first international conference in information systems security and privacy. We are very proud that our paper was awarded a Best Paper Award at ICISSP. While Fabian is on his way to present a paper at ISGT in Washington we’ll celebrate here in Austria.

In the ICISSP paper, privacy issues are discussed that immediately affect the user. For novel energy systems (referred to as the smart grid) a set of tools is presented that allow assessing the privacy impact of particular use cases within the smart grid. A use case is – for instance – the use of smart meter, the utilization of electric vehicles or the active participation in demand response.

In order to capture and combine both, the complexity of the smart grid and the complexity of the individual use cases, an ontology driven approach is presented. Ontologies formally define all entities and relationships in a specific domain. Based on such an ontology, the tool is able to draw conclusions, due to logic derivations and previously integrated external knowledge.

Finally, the degree to which customer privacy is affected is assessed qualitatively (where and how) and quantitatively (to what extent). This assessment allows users to make informed decisions for the usage of and the participation in smart grid applications.

• F. Knirsch, D. Engel, C. Neureiter, M. Frincu, and V. Prasanna, “Model-driven Privacy Assessment in the Smart Grid,” in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP), 2015, p. 173–181.
  [Bibtex]

  @InProceedings{Knirsch15b,
  author = {Fabian Knirsch and Dominik Engel and Christian Neureiter and Marc Frincu and Viktor Prasanna},
  title = {Model-driven Privacy Assessment in the Smart Grid},
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP)}},
  year = {2015},
  pages = {173--181},
  month = {Feb},
  note = {Best Paper Award.},
  pdf = {http://www.en-trust.at/papers/Knirsch15b.pdf},
  }