A Privacy-Preserving Billing Computation and Leakage Detection Framework for Smart Grid

The smart grid, which integrates ubiquitous computing, powerful sensor devices, and wireless communication technologies, is regarded as the new generation of grid system. However, privacy concerns have hindered the widespread adoption of smart grids. Numerous protocols for data aggregation with privacy-preserving features in smart grids have been proposed, but the majority rely on gateways for data aggregation and transmission. The nature of these protocols is hop-by-hop-based, which inevitably leads to a single point of compromise. On the other hand, the communication method used in data aggregation protocols for mobile sensing is end-to-end, which can address the issue of single point compromise in the smart grid. In this article, we propose a novel framework for the smart grid that supports billing computation and leakage detection. The framework is highly efficient for smart meters, as it requires the transmission of only a single piece of data in each sensing period, which can be utilized for two types of aggregation simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that the framework effectively mitigates collusion attacks, achieves high leakage detection rate, and offers advantages in terms of communication overhead.