Elliptic Curve-Based Secure Multidimensional Aggregation for Smart Grid Communications

In smart grid, data aggregation is considered as an essential paradigm in assessing information about current energy usage. To achieve the privacy-preserving goal, several homomorphic-based solutions have been proposed. However, these solutions either consider one-dimensional information or use costly pairing computation in order to ensure source authentication. In fact, smart grid data are likely to be multidimensional (e.g., time, purpose, and so on) for more accurate control. In addition, the aggregation node in smart grid needs to verify data that come from several smart meters in a residential area; hence, the verification must be cost-efficient. In this paper, we propose a scheme that considers multidimensional aggregation with privacy preserving and an efficient verification of smart grid data. The proposal is based on elliptic curve cryptography along with homomorphic encryption and without pairings. The performance analysis shows the efficiency of the scheme for smart grid communications in comparison with existing schemes. For instance, we show that, when an aggregator node is responsible of 600 smart meters, it spends approximately 14 s to verify the data in pairing-based schemes, while only 0.3 s is needed for verification within the proposed scheme.