Balancing Security and Efficiency for Smart Metering against Misbehaving Collectors

Smart grid enables two-way communications between smart meters and operation centers to collect real-time power consumption of customers to improve flexibility, reliability and efficiency of the power system. It brings serious privacy issues to customers, since the meter readings possibly expose customers’ activities in the house. Data encryption can protect the readings, but lengthens the data size. Secure data aggregation improves communication efficiency and preserves customers’ privacy, while fails to support dynamic billing, or offer integrity protection against public collectors, which may be hacked in reality. In this paper, we define a new security model to formalize the misbehavior of collectors, in which the misbehaving collectors may launch pollution attacks to corrupt power consumption data. Under this model, we propose a novel privacy-preserving smart metering scheme to prevent pollution attacks for the balance of security and efficiency in smart grid. It achieves end-to-end security, data aggregation and integrity protection against the misbehaving collectors, which act as local gateways to collect and aggregate usage data and forward to operation centers. As a result, the misbehaving collectors cannot access or corrupt power usage data of customers. In addition, we design a dynamic billing mechanism based on individual power consumption maintained on collectors with the verification of customers. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves secure smart metering and verifiable dynamic billing against misbehaving collectors with low computational and communication overhead.