PF-DA: Pairing Free and Secure Data Aggregation for Energy Internet-Based Smart Meter-to-Grid Communication

The amalgamation of energy, economics and information technology has evolved the paradigm of Energy Internet (EI). This evolution of EI has transformed houses or buildings into home networks (HN) to ease communication between consumer-to-grid. Smart meters deployed at various sites (of HNs) send load, consumption and related information to the control center of the distribution utility. However, data sharing using wireless channels creates associated privacy and security issues and challenges. For example, adversary can capture family life-style from consumption data and may try to commit crime. Besides, data received at control center from various sites must be processed in an efficient manner. Therefore, an efficient protocol for such sharing and processing of data is aggregation scheme. Even though there is a considerable number of data aggregation schemes relying on public-key cryptography have been proposed in the literature. However, most of them are based on the expensive pairing computation and hence are not efficient. To address this issue, in this article we present an efficient and new pairing free and highly secure data aggregation protocol in certificate-based infrastructure. Due to pairing free design, the method’s computational cost is adequately efficient for any resource-constrained devices such as smart appliances or smart meters. The security and performance analysis has been presented to support the deployability of the scheme.