An efficient aggregation scheme resisting on malicious data mining attacks for smart grid

Abstract In the smart grid, efficient power supplies require near-real-time users’ electricity usage metering data, but these data might leak users’ private information, e.g., living habits. To address this problem, a number of privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we present a new type of attack, called malicious data mining attack, by which the adversary can infer a target user’s electricity usage data. When considering this attack, the majority of existing data aggregation schemes have one of the following two shortcomings. In one aspect, the schemes based on homomorphic encryption can output an accurate aggregation result, but most of them are vulnerable to this attack. In another aspect, the schemes based on differential privacy able to withstand this attack, but the random noises introduced prevent accurate aggregation results from being computed. In this paper, we propose a novel data aggregation scheme that is not only secure against the malicious data mining attack, but also capable of outputting an accurate aggregation result. Detailed security analyses indicate that the proposed scheme satisfies the desirable properties for privacy-preserving data aggregation in the smart grid, and the simulated results demonstrate that our proposed scheme enjoys low computation and communication overhead.