A privacy-preserving and cheat-resilient electricity consumption reporting scheme for smart grids

One of the significant benefits of smart grid as compared to conventional power grid is the capability to collect fine-grained data from each smart meter remotely, thereby enabling utility provider to balance load effectively and offer time-adaptive pricing schemes. Nevertheless, the ability to read fine-granular measurements constitutes a serious privacy threat to the consumers. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the privacy issues in smart grid in order to preserve consumers' privacy and protect data integrity. In this paper, we propose a Privacy-Preserving and Cheat-Resilient (PPCR) electricity consumption reporting scheme for smart grid communication. PPCR adopts incremental hash function to conceal consumers' energy usage data from unauthorized parties, as well as the utility companies. The proposed scheme enables utility provider to perform data integrity check without disrupting smart grid services such as load management and billing. Security analysis is conducted to demonstrate that PPCR withstands malicious operations, preserves consumers' privacy and is robust to adversaries' cheating and smart meters malfunction.