Enabling Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Multi-Type Data Aggregation in Smart Grids

In this article, we analyze the inherent characteristic of smart grid systems, where we observe that a smart meter always generates different types of electricity consumption data for one user, and a control center (CC) always conducts an in-depth statistic analysis on these data for subsequent services. Among these data, some of them are very sensitive and should be prevented for any leakage and modification. Furthermore, due to the large number of users in a smart grid system, it is advantageous for CC to receive and process the data from different users simultaneously. To this end, we propose a verifiable privacy-preserving multi-type data aggregation scheme (VPMDA) for smart grids. VPMDA enables an aggregator gateway (AG) to aggregate encrypted multi-type data and forward the aggregated data to CC, such that CC checks the integrity of aggregated data and obtains the statistic analysis results (e.g., average, variance) on the aggregated data without learning each individual data content. We further extend VPMDA to improve the performance of verifying data integrity on CC significantly. We formally prove the security of VPMDA against various attacks. We also implement a prototype of VPMDA and conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation to demonstrate its feasibility and efficiency.