A Privacy-Preserving Homomorphic Scheme With Multiple Dimensions and Fault Tolerance for Metering Data Aggregation in Smart Grid

TLDR: A novel homomorphic privacy-preserving protocol (called NHP3) for data aggregation that has a low computational cost compared to its rivals and is secure even when the gateway or aggregator turns malicious.

Abstract: Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) facilitates the communication between smart meters and network operators in smart grid. For better demand-response management, smart meters are supposed to send live or sometimes periodic consumption reports. If such reports are intercepted or eavesdropped by a malicious entity, customers’ privacy is compromised, since vital information can be inferred from power consumption data. In this article, we propose a novel homomorphic privacy-preserving protocol (called NHP3) for data aggregation that has a low computational cost compared to its rivals. It is fault-tolerant, supports multi-category aggregation, and can do batch verification at the intermediate aggregator as well as the central system. The proposed protocol is secure even when the gateway or aggregator turns malicious. It does not allow any compromised meter to find other users’ consumption information either. Moreover, in this scheme, the central system cannot infer any usage data even if it is curious and gains access to the data packets sent from meters to the intermediate aggregator. A comprehensive and comparative analysis is carried out at the end of this article which shows the advantages of the proposed scheme in terms of security features and cost.