The Attacks Against and Suggestions for the Privacy-Preserving Recording & Gateway-Assisted Authentication of Power Usage Information for Smart Grid

The privacy protection in the smart grid is particularly significant, since sometimes the leak of the user power usage habits may lead to serious consequences. In 2015, Siu-Ming Yiu and Jin Zhong have proposed a privacy-preserving scheme which can protect each user's future power usage plan. However, some insecure factors exist in this scheme. In this paper, we show two major problems about the scheme. Firstly, it cannot resist the denial attack in which a user can deny having sent certain power plan. Secondly, the gateway smart meter doesn't detect the action that some users may send several different or even contradictory power usage plans to the upper gateway simultaneously, which will lead to the result that the user can always avoid punishment when he use more electricity than usual or obtain discount when he use less electricity than usual. We also put forward our suggestions to avoid the problems at the end of the article.