PALDA: Efficient privacy-preserving authentication for lossless data aggregation in Smart Grids

Smart grid is a modern power grid that uses two-way communications between the control center and smart meters to improve efficiency, reliability, flexibility, security, and safety of the grid. Security is one of the critical requirements in smart grid, especially privacy and authentication due to the increase in the point of attacks and the fact that energy usage data can reveal personal information. Moreover, since millions of smart meters create a huge amount of data, a privacy-preserving authentication scheme in smart grid should not only be secure but also efficient in terms of communication and computation cost. In this paper, we propose an efficient Privacy-preserving Authentication for Lossless Data Aggregation scheme (PALDA) that guarantees privacy-preserving for two main energy usage collection scenarios: (1) collecting total sum of energy usage for a group of smart meters and (2) collecting individual energy usage of individual smart meters for a desired period of time. PALDA uses a homomorphic encryption algorithm to reduce communication overhead and spread computation overhead over time. Our numerical analysis result shows that PALDA significantly reduces the computation overhead in comparisons with existing work.