Confidentiality-preserving obfuscation for cloud-based power system contingency analysis

Power system operators are looking to adopt and migrate to cloud technologies and third-party cloud services for customer facing and enterprise IT applications. Security and reliability are major barriers for adopting cloud technologies and services for power system operational applications. In this work we focus on the use of cloud computing for Contingency Analysis and propose an approach to obfuscate information regarding power flows and the presence of a contingency violation while allowing the operator to analyze contingencies with the needed accuracy in the cloud. Our empirical evaluation shows, i) that the errors introduced into power flows due to the obfuscation approach are small, and ii) that the RMS errors introduced grow linearly with the magnitude of obfuscation.