DEP2SA: A Decentralised Efficient Privacy-Preserving and Selective Aggregation Scheme in Advanced Metering Infrastructure

This paper proposes a novel solution, called a decentralised, efficient, privacy-preserving and selective aggregation (DEP2SA) scheme, designed to support secure and user privacy-preserving data collection in the advanced metering infrastructure. DEP2SA is more efficient and applicable in real-life deployment, as compared with the state of the art, by adopting and adapting a number of key technologies: (1) it uses a multi-recipient system model, making it more applicable to a liberalised electricity market; (2) it uses the homomorphic Paillier encryption and selective aggregation methods to protect users’ consumption data against both external and internal attacks, thus making it more secure; (3) it aggregates data at the gateways that are closest to the data originator, thus saving bandwidth and reducing the risk of creating a performance bottleneck in the system; and (4) it uses short signature and batch signature verification methods to further reduce computational and communication overheads imposed on aggregating nodes. The scheme has been analysed in terms of security, computational and communication overheads, and the results show that it is more secure, efficient and scalable than related schemes.