A Privacy-Preserving Smart Metering Scheme Using Linkable Anonymous Credential

Smart grid, as the next power grid, can efficiently monitor, predicate, and control energy generation/consumption by using the real-time users´ electricity information. However, the fine-grained user energy consumption information may reveal the private information of the user. In this paper, we construct a linkable anonymous credential protocol based on Camenisch-Lysyanskaya (CL) signature. Then, we propose a privacy preserving smart metering scheme based on the new linkable anonymous credential. In addition to providing privacy protection for the user, our protocol also has the security properties of message authentication and traceability of fault smart metering. And there are some other useful features in our protocol, such as no need of trust-third party, dynamic users´ enrollment and revocation, and complex statistical analysis of the energy use information. The computation cost and communication overhead of our scheme is O(1), which is independent of the user number. The simulation results show that our scheme is efficient.