Network Coding Based Encryption System for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Abstract

In a smart grid system, the metering data collected by smart meters (SMs) and transferred via an Advanced Metering Infrastructure to the utility for billing purposes, and to the demand-response system to achieve cost effective resource allocation. The collected data at the SMs are sent to aggregators (AGRs), which in turn forward these data to a higher layer data collection system using secured communications. However, metering data are typically transferred between SMs and AGRs over wireless multi-hop communication networks. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, the communications between a SM and AGR are susceptible to many security attacks. We argue that advanced network coding (NC) technology can be utilized to address this problem. We propose a novel system that supports data collection security at AGR by encrypting metering data transmitted between SMs and AGR using NC technology. Our innovative scheme eliminates the use of previously specified public key encryption system between SMs and AGR, which consequently makes our system very efficient. Analyses show that our proposed scheme enhances robustness and throughput of data routing in the wireless multi-hop network between SMs and AGR while maintaining a strong security.

Secure and Scalable Data Collection With Time Minimization in the Smart Grid

“…These approaches take advantage of in-network data processing (also referred to as aggregation) to induce some obfuscating operations on the transmitted data [24]- [31]. Examples of this category include cluster-based private data aggregation [24] and its integrity enhanced version [25], secret perturbation [26], k-indistinguishable privacy-preserving data aggregation [27], a centralized authentication server based in-network aggregation for AMI [28], [29], a secure architecture for distributed aggregation of additive data [30], and a network coding-based encryption between smart meters and aggregators [31]. Unlike these techniques, our problem formulation does not assume any statistical property for in-network processing and deliver the MD data unaltered to the PO.…”

Techniques, Taxonomy, and Challenges of Privacy Protection in the Smart Grid

“…Another category for providing security exploits the aggregate statistics of the sensed data, such as summation, average, minimum, maximum, and so on. These approaches take advantage of in-network data processing (also referred to as aggregation) to apply some obfuscating operations on the transmitted data [35], [58], [73], [78], [79], [98], [101], [124], [142], and [162]. A few common examples in this category include cluster-based private data aggregation [78] and its integrity enhanced version [79], secret perturbation [58], k-indistinguishable privacy-preserving data aggregation [73], a centralized authentication server based in-network aggregation for AMI [98,162], homomorphic encryption-based aggregation [28,33,101], a secure architecture for distributed secure hierarchical data collection aggregation of additive data [141,142], a secure and scalable data collection protocol for smart meter data [87,152], multifunctional, privacy-protecting aggregation [29], and a network coding-based encryption between smart meters and aggregators [124].…”

Secure data collection in constrained tree-based Smart Grid environments

“…Another category for providing security exploits the aggregate statistics of the sensed data, such as summation, average, minimum, maximum, etc. These approaches take advantage of in-network data processing (also referred to as aggregation) to induce some obfuscating operations on the transmitted data [12]- [20]. Our problem formulation does not assume any statistical property for in-network processing.…”