Promoting Privacy in Smart Space

Abstract: The Smart Metering Systems are state of the art technologies and modern services integratedwith legacy metering systems. These systems are one of the most important parts of smart grids.Smart Grids are electrical power infrastructures that make intelligent decisions about the state ofthe electrical power devices. Smart Grids provide a stable electrical power environment. SmartGrids support all functionalities of traditional power systems in addition a Smart Grid bears newfunctionalities of intelligent power systems e.g. self-healing, resisting to attacks, increasingpower quality, motivating consumers to wisely use the electricity, enabling new business toelectrical markets, optimizing assets and operating efficiently and accommodating all generationand storages options. A smart home is usually a modern home that is equipped with some specialstructured wiring or wireless systems to enable inhabitants to remotely control or program any ofhome electronic devices supporting specific types of control functionalities by entering a singlecommand at their remote computer or smart phones. Privacy in smart spaces/environments is notonly confidentiality of data /connections but is the management of the complication of theseenvironments due to decentralised and dynamic nature of these spaces. General model of smarthome and smart metering systems have their specific considerations e.g. assumptions, threats,countermeasures and privacy preserving model. Both security architectures have their specificsecurity policies, considerations, authorization and authentication authorities, and encryption anddecryption strategies. Running two different security architectures in parallel may raise someissues, threats and considerations that are the main purpose of this thesis project. So, theprinciple goal of this research project is to define the secure model of collaboration between twodifferent security architectures in the smart space in which general smart home networkarchitecture is established in parallel to smart metering system architecture. Federatedauthentication systems e.g. SAML and OAuth, OpenID and federated authorization systems likeXACML are most common distributed standard protocols to manage distributed securitysystems. This thesis investigates issues and problems of two parallel security architectures andproposes a secure communication protocol in addition to a proof-of-concept of the final solution.All of most famous available protocols for authentication and authorization will be discussed andfinally will be implemented as a proof of concept. Encryption and decryption as basic securityfunctions is not considered in this project and will be postponed as a future work around thisresearch project.