A Secure Data Aggregation and Dispatch Scheme for Home Area Networks in Smart Grid

Cyber security for smart grid communication systems is one of the most critical requirements need to be assured before smart grid can be operationally ready for the market. Privacy is one of very important security consideration. The customer information privacy in smart grid need to be protected. Smart grid data privacy encompasses confidentiality and anonymity of the information extracted from smart device metering transmission in smart grid communication system. In this paper, we consider a home area network as a basic reading data aggregation and dispatch unit in smart grid systems. Then, we propose a secure in-network data aggregation and dispatch scheme to keep the confidentiality and anonymity for collecting power usage information of home smart devices to the household smart meter and the reverse control message distributing procedure. Specifically, we introduce an orthogonal chip code to spread reading-data of different home smart devices into spread code, followed by a circuit shifting operation to coupling neighboring smart devices tightly. We adopt an in-network mechanism to further mask it with its spread data with its forwarding data. Finally, we analyze the cyber security protection levels using an information theoretic quantity, residual uncertainty. Simulation studies are conducted to test the performance on different metering datasets for the proposed scheme. This paper sets the ground for further research on optimizing of home power management systems with regarding to the privacy of customer power usage behaviors.