Title: Secure and privacy-preserving information aggregation for smart grids

Authors: Fengjun Li, Bo Luo, Peng Liu

Addresses: College of IST, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' Department of EECS, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. ' College of IST, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we present a distributed incremental data aggregation approach, in which data aggregation is performed at all smart meters involved in routing the data from the source meter to the collector unit. With a carefully constructed aggregation tree, the aggregation route covers the entire local neighbourhood or any arbitrary set of designated nodes with minimum overhead. To protect user privacy, homomorphic encryption is used to secure the data enroute. Therefore, all the meters participate in the aggregation, without seeing any intermediate or final result. In this way, our approach supports efficient data aggregation in smart grids, while fully protecting user privacy. This approach is especially suitable for smart grids with repetitive routine data aggregation tasks.

Keywords: smart grid; information aggregation; data security; privacy protection; electricity networks; data aggregation; smart meters; homomorphic encryption; cryptography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2011.039631

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2011 Vol.6 No.1, pp.28 - 39

Published online: 12 Apr 2011 *

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