Lightweight Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation for Smart Grids

As an indispensable part of a smart city, the smart grid has gained widespread attention from industrial and academic communities. How to securely collect users' real-time energy consumption data to provide services such as big data analytics and demand-response services while ensuring the privacy of individual users is a challenging issue in the smart grid. The privacy-preserving data aggregation (P2DA) suggests a feasible solution. For years, researchers have designed numerous P2DA schemes for securing smart grids. Unfortunately, the majority of them have some security and privacy deficiencies. Other schemes are unsuitable for resource-constrained smart meters due to expensive cryptographic operations. In this work, we design a lightweight verifiable certificate-based P2DA scheme LV-P2DA without pairings for smart grids. We formally prove its security under standard cryptographic assumptions. The performance comparison results illustrate that compared with state-of-the-art solutions, our design achieves at least a 99.43% improvement in computational cost and a 32.96% improvement in communication cost on the smart meter side, respectively.