An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme for Smart Grids in Cloud Environment

Smart grids are emerging as a crucial national infrastructure, as they support not only the power transmission but also the transmission of operational information. The smart meters are a fundamental element of the smart grid which record and transmit the power usage information of customers to the utility through intermediate aggregator nodes. Since the information communication is based on advanced digital technology, the smart grids are highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. They require a highly secure and privacy preserving solutions for communication along with minimal computation and communication overheads. Additionally, the aggregator nodes require to verify the authenticity of the received consumption data, which is also supposed to be cost efficient. However, a lot of research solutions are being provided over the security and privacy issues through fully homomorphic and pairing based operations. These solutions lead to a heavy computation and communication costs. Thereby, to cater the crucial cybersecurity concerns of the grid system, an efficient, secure and privacy preserving scheme (EPDA) is proposed that is based on elliptic curve ElGamal cryptosystem. The performance analysis depicts the efficacy of the proposed scheme in terms of computation and communication costs and the storage overhead as well. The computation cost at the end of smart meter, fog node and control center is reduced by 57.88%, 98.07% and 93.23%, respectively, over state of the art works. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.