An Efficient and Privacy Protection Communication Scheme for Smart Grid

Smart grid is a modern electric power grid designed to improve efficiency and reliability of the production and distribution of electric power. In a smart grid, smart meters continuously generate electric power consumption data and send it to the server. These data have two important purposes: (1) The sum of the data generated by each meter in a certain period of time will be used for billing; (2) The sum of the data generated by all meters in a specific area at a given time will be used to predict the electric power required in that area for electric power distribution. These data are considered to be sensitive and should be properly protected. There have been many studies on the confidentiality and privacy protection of these data. Some schemes require trusted servers, some schemes require heavy computation, and some schemes need to send two sets of data, one for billing and the other for electric power distribution. In this article, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving communication scheme for the transmission of meter data in a smart grid. No trusted authorities are required in the scheme. By sending only one set of data, the new communication scheme can ensure that both sums for billing and sums for electric power distribution can be computed accurately. The scheme uses only simple operations, such as addition and hashes. It is computationally lightweight and suitable for devices with limited computing resources.