A lightweight privacy-preserving scheme for metering data collection in smart grid

In smart grids, smart meters are the metering devices that are responsible for collecting users' information about their electricity consumption. Smart meters provide an effective means for control center (CC) to monitor the power supply and consumption in a timely and accurate fashion. However, the collection of users' metering reports through an untrusted public network raises a serious privacy concern of users. Even though a lot of privacy-preserving approaches that have been proposed in the literature for secure data transmission, they are not directly applicable to the scenario of collecting metering reports in smart grids due to the limited computational resources of smart meters and the networking environment of smart grids. In this paper, we propose a lightweight privacy-preserving scheme for metering data collection in smart grids. There are three advantages of our proposed scheme: 1) Lightweight. There is no need for users' metering devices to carry out intensive encryption and decryption operations. 2) No need of a trusted third party for key generation and key management. 3) Scalability. Our scheme can cater for large scale of users connected via public networks. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme is efficiently and lightweight and is suitable for privacy-preserving data collection in smart grids.