A robust and privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for secure smart grid communications in digital communities

By offering indisputable advantages over traditional grid including remote readings and load balancing, smart grid is regarded as the modernization of the electricity delivery system. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving and secure multi-dimensional aggregation scheme for smart grid communications in digital communities. By integrating privacy homomorphism encryption with aggregation signature scheme, data authentication and integrity protection are performed and proved without disclosing any fine-grained user consumption data. The construction of member list allows the fault tolerance of our scheme against accidental errors. In addition, the batch verification technique is adopted to reduce the computation cost of the operation center, and each user's computation cost is independent of the number of collected data types. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme can resist various security threats and preserve identity privacy and has significantly less communication overhead and computation cost than other existing approaches. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.