Privacy Preservation Scheme for Multicast Communications in Smart Buildings of the Smart Grid

Privacy preservation is a crucial issue for smart buildings where all kinds of messages, e.g., power usage data, control commands, events, alarms, etc. are transmitted to accomplish the management of power. Without appropriate privacy protection schemes, electricity customers are faced with various privacy risks. Meanwhile, the natures of smart grids and smart buildings—such as having limited computation power of smart devices and constraints in communication network capabilities, while requiring being highly reliable—make privacy preservation a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a group key scheme to safeguard multicast privacy with the provisions of availability, fault-tolerance, and efficiency in the context of smart buildings as a part the smart grid. In particular, hybrid architecture accommodating both centralized and contributory modes is constructed in order to achieve both fault-tolerance and efficiency with only one set of group key installed. Key trees are sophisticatedly managed to reduce the number of exponentiation operations. In addition, an individual rekeying scheme is introduced for occasional joining and leaving of member smart meters. Experimental results, on a simulation platform, show that our scheme is able to provide significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods while effectively preserving the participants’ privacy.