An ElGamal-based efficient and privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme for smart grid

Abstract

Smart Grid technologies are ever-increasingly being adopted by nations and governments, primarily for a huge technological advancement in the areas of power management and information and communications. The smart meters deployed in a household can monitor electricity usage in real-time, and aggregate the data for further analysis and control; however, the existing solutions mainly depend on Paillier's additive homomorphic encryptions, which are of high computational complexity. This inefficiency makes them impracticable in smart grid, which embraces thousands of users and requires frequent data aggregation. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving aggregation framework, followed by a concrete construction using Elgamal encryption, which is secure under chosen plaintext attack (CPA) but not chosen ciphertext attack (CCA). Then, we further extend the concrete construction into a CCA-secure counterpart. In addition to efficient data aggregation, the proposed scheme can protect the user's meter data from sophisticated attacks, which are sponsored by the community gateway and the users. The formal security proof and performance evaluations illustrate the efficiency and the practicability of our scheme as well as its strong security.