The recent deployment of smart grids has proven to bring numerous advantages in terms of energy consumption reduction in both homes and businesses. A more accurate measurement of up-to-date electricity necessities through smart meters utilization leads to an enhancement in the ability of monitoring, controlling and predicting energy use. Nevertheless, it has associated drawbacks related to the privacy of customers as well, since such management might reveal their personal habits and behavior, which electrical appliances they are using at each moment, whether they are at home or not, and so on. In this article we present a privacy enhanced architecture for smart metering aimed to tackle this threat by means of a new and novel protocol encrypting individual measurements while allowing the electricity supplier to access the aggregation of the corresponding decrypted values. The technique being used is named additively homomorphic encryption, and enables the direct connection and exchange of data between electricity suppliers and final users, while preserving the privacy of the latter.

The amount of data generated by the current interconnected world is immeasurable, and a large part of such data is publicly available, which means that it is accessible by any user, at any time, from anywhere in the Internet. In this respect, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a type of intelligence that actually benefits from that open nature by collecting, processing and correlating points of the whole cyberspace to generate knowledge. In fact, recent advances in technology are causing OSINT to currently evolve at a dizzying rate, providing innovative data-driven and AI-powered applications for politics, economy or society, but also offering new lines of action against cyberthreats and cybercrime. The paper at hand describes the current state of OSINT and makes a comprehensive review of the paradigm, focusing on the services and techniques enhancing the cybersecurity field. On the one hand, we analyze the strong points of this methodology and propose numerous ways to apply it to cybersecurity. On the other hand, we cover the limitations when adopting it. Considering there is a lot left to explore in this ample field, we also enumerate some open challenges to be addressed in the future. Additionally, we study the role of OSINT in the public sphere of governments, which constitute an ideal landscape to exploit open data.