A security privacy protection scheme for data collection of smart meters based on homomorphic encryption

Abstract

In smart grid, more and more people and communities pay their attentions to the privacy protection issues. Some researchers try to use homomorphic encryption to protect users' privacy and achieve a certain result. However it also brings new problems, such as Energy Suppliers (ES) cannot detect whether the Smart Meter (SM) data is correct. Assume that the key used for encryption of SM data may be known by adversary for some period, i.e., adversary can tamper SM data in this period. However, ES cannot decrypt every SM data to check whether the data is tampered in homomorphic encryption scheme. In this paper, we provide a novel secure SM data collection scheme to detect whether SM data is tampered in protecting users' privacy premise. The SM data include two types, one is user's consumption value from the last slot to the current slot and the other is the SM reading in the current slot. So the consumption value is result of the difference between SM reading in the current slot and that in the last slot. Using homomorphic encryption, we can compare whether both sides of the equation is still equal. In this way, ES can understand whether the data packet is tampered but does not know the specific value.