PPPA: A practical privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for smart grid communications

Characterized by time-of-using pricing, better capacity, and usage planning, smart grid has attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, one of the research challenges in smart grid is the privacy issue due to too much sensitive and real-time user data involved. In this paper, we propose a practical privacy-preserving aggregation scheme, named PPPA, for secure smart grid communications. PPPA utilizes the lightweight cryptographic aggregation technique to achieve provable security guarantee, the differential privacy technique to achieve privacy preservation of each individual user, and the quad tree structure to achieve failure tolerance. For data communication from users to control center, data aggregation is conducted directly on ciphertexts at local gateway without decryption, and the aggregation results are reported by relays to the control center. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that PPPA can not only provide authentication and guarantee the data integrity, but also achieve strong privacy-preserving for each user, and thus it is feasible in practical smart grid scenarios.