Paper 2011/134

Differentially Private Billing with Rebates

George Danezis, Markulf Kohlweiss, and Alfredo Rial

Abstract

A number of established and novel business models are based on fine grained billing, including pay-per-view, mobile messaging, voice calls, pay-as-you-drive insurance, smart metering for utility provision, private computing clouds and hosted services. These models apply fine-grained tariffs dependent on time-of-use or place of-use to readings to compute a bill. We extend previously proposed billing protocols to strengthen their privacy in two key ways. First, we study the monetary amount a customer should add to their bill in order to provably hide their activities, within the differential privacy framework. Second, we propose a cryptographic protocol for oblivious billing that ensures any additional expenditure, aimed at protecting privacy, can be tracked and reclaimed in the future, thus minimising its cost. Our proposals can be used together or separately and are backed by provable guarantees of security.

Note: Some minor corrections.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF PS
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
Smart MeteringDifferential Privacy
Contact author(s)
markulf @ microsoft com
History
2011-04-12: revised
2011-03-21: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2011/134
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2011/134,
      author = {George Danezis and Markulf Kohlweiss and Alfredo Rial},
      title = {Differentially Private Billing with Rebates},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2011/134},
      year = {2011},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/134}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/134}
}
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