EPPA: An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Aggregation Scheme for Secure Smart Grid Communications

TLDR

Smart grid integrates power system engineering with ICT, aiming to deliver reliable, efficient, flexible, clean, friendly, and secure power for the next generation. This work proposes EPPA, an efficient and privacy‑preserving aggregation scheme for smart‑grid communications. EPPA structures multidimensional data with a superincreasing sequence, encrypts it using homomorphic Paillier, aggregates ciphertext at local gateways, and retrieves the original data at the operation center while employing batch verification to lower authentication cost. Analysis shows EPPA resists multiple security threats, preserves user privacy, and achieves substantially lower computation and communication overhead than existing methods.

Abstract

The concept of smart grid has emerged as a convergence of traditional power system engineering and information and communication technology. It is vital to the success of next generation of power grid, which is expected to be featuring reliable, efficient, flexible, clean, friendly, and secure characteristics. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving aggregation scheme, named EPPA, for smart grid communications. EPPA uses a superincreasing sequence to structure multidimensional data and encrypt the structured data by the homomorphic Paillier cryptosystem technique. For data communications from user to smart grid operation center, data aggregation is performed directly on ciphertext at local gateways without decryption, and the aggregation result of the original data can be obtained at the operation center. EPPA also adopts the batch verification technique to reduce authentication cost. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that EPPA resists various security threats and preserve user privacy, and has significantly less computation and communication overhead than existing competing approaches.