CB-DA: lightweight and escrow-free certificate-based data aggregation for smart grid

Recent development of smart cities includes advanced and necessary use of modern smart grid (SG), than the traditional power grid. The paradigm of SG has also transformed houses into a home area networks (HAN). In HAN, several smart devices and appliances are connected to the electricity control centers (ECC). Appliances share their load and consumption related information to ECC through smart meters. The consumption data may be used for supply-demand management, for example, by ramping production up or down as needed. However, security and privacy of the consumers data are greatly important, since fine-grained smart meter data may reveal an users presence/absence in his/her house. To address this issue, several public-key-based or identity-based data aggregation schemes have been proposed in the literature. However, most of such schemes either suffer from the complexity of certificate management or key escrow problem. To eliminate these issues, in this paper we propose an efficient certificate-based data aggregation (CB-DA) scheme. In the proposed CB-DA scheme, the owner selects a secret key and then use the secret key along with certificates as decryption/signing keys.