Secure and Scalable Aggregation in the Smart Grid

In this work, we describe two decentralized protocols that can be used to securely aggregate the electricity measurements made by n smart meters. The first protocol is a very lightweight one, it uses only symmetric cryptographic primitives and provides security against honest-but-curious adversaries. The second one is public-key based and its focus in on the malicious adversarial model; malicious entities not only try to learn the private measurements of smart meters but can also disrupt protocol execution. Both protocols do not rely on centralized entities or trusted third parties to operate and they are highly scalable since every smart meter has to interact with only a few other meters. Both are very efficient in practice requiring only O(1) work and memory overhead per meter, thus making these protocols fit for real-life smart grid deployments.