Thwarting Nonintrusive Occupancy Detection Attacks from Smart Meters

Abstract

Occupancy information is one of the most important privacy issues of a home. Unfortunately, an attacker is able to detect occupancy from smart meter data. The current battery-based load hiding (BLH) methods cannot solve this problem. To thwart occupancy detection attacks, we propose a framework of battery-based schemes to prevent occupancy detection (BPOD). BPOD monitors the power consumption of a home and detects the occupancy in real time. According to the detection result, BPOD modifies those statistical metrics of power consumption, which highly correlate with the occupancy by charging or discharging a battery, creating a delusion that the home is always occupied. We evaluate BPOD in a simulation using several real-world smart meter datasets. Our experiment results show that BPOD effectively prevents the threshold-based and classifier-based occupancy detection attacks. Furthermore, BPOD is also able to prevent nonintrusive appliance load monitoring attacks (NILM) as a side-effect of thwarting detection attacks.