Abstract
The traditional security objectives of smart grids have been availability, integrity, and confidentiality. However, as the grids incorporate smart metering and load management, user and corporate privacy is increasingly becoming an issue in smart grid networks. Although transmitting current power consumption levels to the supplier or utility from each smart meter at short intervals has an advantage for the electricity supplier’s planning and management purposes, it threatens user privacy by disclosing fine-grained consumption data and usage behavior to utility providers. In this study, we propose a distributed incremental data aggregation scheme where all smart meters on an aggregation path are involved in routing the data from the source meter to the collection unit. User privacy is preserved by symmetric homomorphic encryption, which allows smart meters to participate in the aggregation without seeing any intermediate or final result. Aggregated data is further integrated with an aggregate signature to achieve data integrity and smart meter authentication in such a way that dishonest or fake smart meters cannot falsify data en route. Only the collection unit can obtain the aggregated data and verify its integrity while the individual plain data are not exposed to the collection unit. Therefore, user privacy and security are improved for the smart metering in a smart grid network.
Highlights
Smart grids are envisioned as a generation approach to delivering electricity to millions of households by stakeholders
To fulfill the somewhat contradictory requirement of enabling the collection unit to verify the integrity of aggregated meter readings without revealing any individual measurements, we propose a novel aggregation scheme with authentication capability for smart metering
An identity-based sequential aggregate signature suits the verification of metering data aggregates in smart grid networks because signatures are aggregated one-by-one as the aggregate-so-far moves along the path, which is natural in the routing-based applications we consider
Summary
Smart grids are envisioned as a generation approach to delivering electricity to millions of households by stakeholders. One promising technical solution to protect user privacy is anonymizing each packet of high-frequency metering data by aggregating them at multiple levels (e.g., neighborhood, subdivision, district, and city) via privacy-protecting cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption [9,10] In this approach, the data collection unit can obtain sums of the measurements of all the connected smart meters without learning the individual measurements. On the other hand, when the measurements of smart meters are aggregated using the previous homomorphic encryptions [9,10,11] in order to protect user privacy, a signature scheme cannot enable the collection unit to verify the authenticity of plain (aggregated or individual) data. This is a problem we will attempt to solve in this study
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