A lightweight and fault-tolerable data aggregation scheme for privacy-friendly smart grids environment

The smart grid has attracted great attention as a new energy network. The power supplier collects the total consumption data through the smart meter. The data aggregation is a common operation in smart grid. However, the majority of existing data aggregation schemes are based on homomorphic encryption, suffering from heavy computation overhead. Recently, Gope et al. put forward a masking-based data aggregation scheme in smart grid, but there are some security problems by analyzing their scheme. If one of consumption data does not arrive at the aggregator on time, the power supplier will get incorrect aggregation results. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight and fault-tolerable data aggregation scheme. It can determine which smart meters fail to upload data on time with the idea of flag bit, and then power supplier can calculate the masking value of failed smart meter. So the proposed scheme can ensure the correctness of the final aggregation result even if a smart meter fails to upload data. In addition, the proposed scheme can achieve authentication and data collection only using one round of communication interaction while other schemes need more rounds. Security proof shows that the proposed scheme can achieve indistinguishable privacy. Experimental data confirms the efficiency of the proposed scheme.