A robust, distributed, and privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for smart grid communications

Smart grids are conceived to ensure smarter generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of electricity. It integrates the traditional electricity grid with information and communication technology. This enables a two-way communication among the smart grid entities, which translates to exchange of information about fine-grained user energy consumption between the smart grid entities. However, the flow of user energy consumption data may lead to the violation of user privacy. Inference on such data can expose the daily habits and types of appliances of users. Thus, several privacy preservation schemes have been proposed in the literature to ensure the privacy and security requirements of smart grid users. This chapter provides a review of some privacy preservation schemes. The schemes operational procedure, strengths, and weaknesses are discussed. A taxonomy, comparison table, and comparative analysis are also presented. The comparative analysis gives an insight on open research issues in privacy preservation schemes.

The concept of smart grid has emerged as a convergence of traditional power system engineering and information and communication technology. It is vital to the success of next generation of power grid, which is expected to be featuring reliable, efficient, flexible, clean, friendly, and secure characteristics. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving aggregation scheme, named EPPA, for smart grid communications. EPPA uses a superincreasing sequence to structure multidimensional data and encrypt the structured data by the homomorphic Paillier cryptosystem technique. For data communications from user to smart grid operation center, data aggregation is performed directly on ciphertext at local gateways without decryption, and the aggregation result of the original data can be obtained at the operation center. EPPA also adopts the batch verification technique to reduce authentication cost. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that EPPA resists various security threats and preserve user privacy, and has significantly less computation and communication overhead than existing competing approaches.

The conventional power grid has gone into transition and converted into what is called "smart grid The smart grid helps to bring reliability, monitoring, controllability, and efficiency. It provides a bidirectional flow of energy and communication. The major element of the smart grid is the communication networks. The smart grid system is comprised of different types of smart devices and heterogeneous networks. These communication networks are prone to many kinds of attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Man In The Middle (MITM) and replay attacks. As a result, the smart grid is becoming a major target for cybercriminals. In this paper, the vulnerabilities and security issues exist in the smart grid are presented. Finally, the solutions for mitigating the attacks are discussed. It provides an overview of security issues present in the communication system in the smart grid. With this paper, readers can gain more understanding of security issues present in the smart grid communication systems, networks, and devices.

Smart Grids (SG) may be the most significant technological change in the history of electric grids, that can help curb the looming energy crisis worldwide, with intelligent generation, transmission and distribution of energy using a robust communication network. Power lines are a very promising solution for carrying data to serve as broadband access network in the context of SG, along with the wireless communication techniques. This paper investigates the design and simulation of a digital communication system optimized for Power Line Communication (PLC) in Smart Grids. For the proposed PLC transceiver, we consider Discrete Multitone (DMT) modulation based on a modified bit loading technique for the subcarriers. Our results reveal that the proposed incremental bit loading algorithm enhances data rate, and reduces computation time, as compared to the originally proposed incremental bit loading algorithm for PLC.

A systematic review of data protection and privacy preservation schemes for smart grid communications

The inclusion of renewable energy in the conventional grid system and the digitalization of the various aspects of the power system have precipitated the transformation of the traditional grid system to a smart grid. Key to the implementation of the smart grid is various communication technologies. The emerging dominance of communication technologies in power systems applications is pivotal to modernizing the conventional grid system. This research presented an overview of the application of communication technologies in the digitalization of the power systems network. It reviews smart grid communication technologies, their features, relevance, and various roles being played toward delivering an effective electrical service to stakeholders. Hence, this study focused on wireless and wired communication technologies applicable to smart grid applications. Based on the review, each communication technology has its strengths and weaknesses; hence in selecting the most appropriate technology for application in a smart grid, a compromise must be made. Therefore, for choosing the most preferred communication technology in any smart grid application, it is important to deploy the efficacy of multi-criteria methods. To serve as a case study, a framework for selecting a communication technology for advanced metering infrastructure is proposed and applied. Based on the spectrum, data rate, and coverage range, the study revealed that WiMAX communication technology is the most preferred, followed by Zigbee; the least preferred communication technology for smart grid communication is Power Line Communication (PLC).

Smart grid has become the hot topic to domestic and foreign about the development trend of power grid in recent years, and communication technology is foundation of the development of smart grid; the paper forecasts the smart grid communications automation and development trend.Further from intelligent dispatching center, smart grid, smart distribution grid and users, in view of the existing and emerging intelligent and automatic application were communication needs analysis, and provide a reliable basis for the smart grid communications planning.

A smart grid constitutes an electrical infrastructure that integrates communication technologies to optimize electricity production, distribution, and consumption. Within the smart grid, IEEE 802.11 networks play a crucial role in facilitating communication between smart meters and data collectors, operating within a shared transmission medium. However, a notable challenge arises due to the lack of certainty regarding the genuine identity of data recipients. In response, we present a solution—a novel covert channel leveraging the IEEE 802.11 backoff procedure—to transmit data that requires special protection. Implemented using the ns-3 simulator, our covert channel achieved a throughput of 140,000 bps when single covert station realized transmission in the wireless channel, and 880 bps in a populated environment characterized by high traffic volumes. This performance metric shows that our mechanism is better than other covert channels, where the performance in saturated conditions usually does not exceed several hundred bps. This covert channel represents a new approach to fortifying data integrity and privacy within smart grid communication.

Smart grid is an essential part of the world's changing energy landscape. The uptake of smart grid by utilities is however hampered by the perceived complexity and large capital investment required to implement resilient Information Communication Technology (ICT) and networks that can support self-healing smart grids. Furthermore, failure to meet stringent smart grid communication reliability requirements can have disastrous consequences for grid owners and users. Many of the challenges utilities face with their smart grid ICT network development plans can be attributed to a reliance on conventional designs centred on expanding network hardware infrastructure in vast grid networks. What is needed to overcome these challenges is alternative ways of designing smart grid communication networks, using software defined approaches. This paper proposes a framework that supports software defined designs by combining the principles of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication. Using the frameworks of software defined systems and virtualisation, our proposed architecture aims to provide a more flexible and affordable approach to developing and maintaining grid communication networks while offering a high level of network reliability, required for various smart grid applications. An evaluation of the implementation of this architecture in a design, based on a real city distribution grid, shows that a software defined communication network is easy to implement when using virtual machines running on existing computer infrastructure and that it is capable of supporting the network functions required for improving communication reliability. We conclude that this approach can potentially promote the adoption of smart grid by utilities while offering new innovative ways for smart grid developers to improve their grid designs.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are aimed at combining the physical system with the cyber ones to provide a better control and improve the management of physical systems around us. Recently, the CPS and its applications, e.g., health-care and smart grid, have gained attention of the research community. In this paper, we consider the privacy aspect of users in a CPS, particularly in smart grid system as our use-case, and provide a mechanism that utilizes the advances in network coding to maintain data privacy. We address privacy issues associated with gathering metering information of clients in a smart grid system. In smart grid systems, wireless multi-hop communications are mainly used to gather metering information through exchanging data and control messages between smart meters and the utility. We argue that any communication paradigm used in a smart grid should support all aspects of privacy such as anonymity, unlinkability, unobservablity, and undetectablity. We propose innovative schemes for traffic routing and encryption that benefit from the enhanced network coding technology. Our analysis shows that our schemes maintain privacy of users despite the possibility of detecting metering data by an adversary. In addition, our scheme has extra favorable features such as less computation complexity, reliable, and robust communication.

The smart grid provides a platform for thirdparty service providers to remotely monitor and manage energy usage for consumers. At the same time, the involvement of service providers brings a new set of security threats to the smart grid. In this article, we first identify the cyber security challenges on service provision in the smart grid. Then we present two main security issues related to service provision and provide potential solutions. The first one is to establish a secure communication procedure among the electric utility, consumers, and service providers. The second one is to provide a privacy-preserving yet accountable authentication framework among the smart grid entities without relying on any trusted third party. Finally, we suggest directions of future work on secure service provision by describing several open issues. 1979-2012 IEEE.

Characterized by time-of-using pricing, better capacity, and usage planning, smart grid has attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, one of the research challenges in smart grid is the privacy issue due to too much sensitive and real-time user data involved. In this paper, we propose a practical privacy-preserving aggregation scheme, named PPPA, for secure smart grid communications. PPPA utilizes the lightweight cryptographic aggregation technique to achieve provable security guarantee, the differential privacy technique to achieve privacy preservation of each individual user, and the quad tree structure to achieve failure tolerance. For data communication from users to control center, data aggregation is conducted directly on ciphertexts at local gateway without decryption, and the aggregation results are reported by relays to the control center. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that PPPA can not only provide authentication and guarantee the data integrity, but also achieve strong privacy-preserving for each user, and thus it is feasible in practical smart grid scenarios.

Electric power grids are lagging in flexibility and time-response. A smart grid is an improved version of electrical grids that leverages Internet of Things (IoT) based devices to improve the overall infrastructure from the grid stations to intelligent appliances. It provides better understanding of supply and demand and overall flow of data depending based upon the requirements. Modern approach towards Smart grid envisions to provide electricity consumers with the opportunity to manage their respective power usage. Population increase has played a major role in the adoption of smart grid as a lot of electrical energy is consumed in the residential sector and a lot of architectures have been proposed for better flow of information from the smart meter to connectors and devices for improved customer participation. Customer needs have been very important in the smart grid. However, the customers have never been provided with the ease of choosing their own kind of benefits from the smart grid. In this work, we propose an enhanced architecture working effectively for multiple users based on their requirements. The users would be able to choose their type of scheduling techniques based on their requirements. These requirements may include cost reduction and increasing user comfort for better consumption of electricity and reliable systems. These requirements can be achieved using different Bio inspired computing based scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, in this work, we provide a comparison of these bio inspired scheduling techniques, i.e., Enhanced Differential Evolution, Bacterial Foraging Algorithm and Grey Wolf Optimization integrated in smart grid architecture for providing better consumption of electricity and achieving reliable systems. These algorithms mainly aim to schedule load, minimize electricity bills and maximize the user comfort depending on user demand.

As a result of the old-style electric grid's inability to handle the extensive incorporation of renewable energy resources and distributed renewable energy resources into the electric grid. In the twenty-first century, smart grid technology has entered the picture. Because smart grids operate on two-way communication, communication and information technology are critical to the smart grid's effective operation. The advanced version of the smart grid structure is presented in this article. Furthermore, this article discusses existing and advanced communication and information technology. Finally, the manuscript discusses future research advancements in communication and the most crucial information technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, fog and edge computing, and blockchain in the smart grid. So, the smart grid can manage the massive integration of renewable energy resources while providing customers with efficient, sustainable, and reliable power.KeywordsIoT-Internet of ThingICT-Information and Communication TechnologyCC: Cloud Computing

In this paper, we present a signcryption scheme called CP_ABSC based on Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP_ABE)[7] to secure the multicast communications in smart grids that require access control, data encryption, and authentication to ensure message integrity and confidentiality. CP_ABSC provides algorithms for key management, signcryption, and designcryption. It can be used to signcrypt a message based on the access rights specified by the message itself. A user can designcrypt a ciphertext if and only if it possesses the attributes required by the access structure of the data. Thus CP_ABSC effectively defines a multicast group based on the access rights of the data specified by the data itself, which differs significantly from the traditional Internet based multicast where the destination group is predetermined and must be known by the data source. CP_ABSC provides collusion attack resistance, message authentication, forgery prevention, and confidentiality. It can be easily applied in smart grids to secure the instructions/commands broadcast from a utility company to multiple smart meters (push-based multicast) and the data retrieved from a smart meter to multiple destinations (pull-based multicast). Compared to CP_ABE, CP_ABSC combines encryption with signature at a lower computational cost for signcryption and a slightly higher cost in designcryption for signature verification. We also consider the adoption of attribute-based signature (ABS), and conclude that CP_ABSC has a much lower computational cost than ABS.