An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme in Smart Grid

Today with development of smart grids (SG), security and efficiency topics are more important than the past. In smart grids, there are smart meter (SM) devices in residential area that send their measured data to control center (CC) for future analysis. This way, user data may pass through a few internal nodes to reach the CC. Hence, privacy preserving of user data is one of the biggest challenges in smart grid researches because by disclosing the user-related data, internal or external adversary can understand habits and behaviors of users. A solution to address this challenge is the data aggregation mechanism in which CC obtain the aggregated data of all of the users in a residential area (RA). In this paper, we present an efficient approach for data aggregation in smart grids using the AV-net mask and Paillier encryption system to preserve the user data privacy. The proposed protocol does not need any secure channel. Besides, the conducted security and performance analysis shows that not only the proposed approach is secure against eavesdropping attack and collusion up to n-2 level, but also its computational overhead is acceptable comparing the previous works.