An Identity-Based Data Aggregation Protocol for the Smart Grid

Abstract

The smart grid significantly improves the reliability, efficiency, security, and sustainability of electricity services. It plays an important role in modern energy infrastructure. A drawback of this new technique, however, is that the fine-grained metering data may leak private customer information. Thus, various public-key based data aggregation protocols for privacy protection have been proposed. However, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has recommended not using public-key based cryptography in the smart grid, since maintaining the public-key infrastructure is a heavy cost. In this paper, we propose an identity-based data aggregation protocol for the smart grid, which cannot only prevent unauthorized reading and fine-grained analyzing but can also protect against unintentional errors and maliciously altered messages. The basic building block of our protocol is an identity-based encryption and signature scheme in which an identity-based encryption scheme is combined with an identity-based signature scheme. They share the same private/public parameters, which greatly reduces the complexity of the protocol in the smart grid. Security analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our protocol in the context of six typical attacks against the smart grid. A prototype implementation based on the Intel Edison platform shows that our protocol is efficient enough for physically constrained smart grid operators, such as smart meters.