Comment on “Privacy-Enhanced Data Aggregation Scheme Against Internal Attackers in Smart Grid”

Quite recently, Fan et al. ( IEEE Trans. Ind. Informat. , vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 666–675, 2014) proposed a new data aggregation scheme for smart grid communications, and claimed that it can achieve not only user’s privacy-preservation, but also data integrity requirement. However, in this paper, we show that Fan et al. ’s scheme has a serious security flaw and cannot meet data integrity requirement at all. Specifically, by observing the user registration procedure in Fan et al. ’s scheme, we find that each user’s private key can be easily derived from the information published by the aggregator. Then, with the derived private key, an attacker can inject polluted data to user’s real data without being detected. As a result, data integrity will be completely violated. We hope that with our comment, similar mistakes can be avoided in future design of privacy-preserving data aggregation with data integrity protection.