A lightweight lattice-based security and privacy-preserving scheme for smart grid

Security and privacy concerns are significant challenges in the smart grid, especially in regards to the privacy of the electricity customers, as customers' daily habits and personal information can be revealed from their consumption patterns. The current security and privacy-preserving schemes depend on periodic reports for customers' consumption; these reports increase the computation and communication overheads on the limited-resources smart meters. This paper proposes a security and privacy-preserving scheme in the building area network (BAN), which is a cluster of home area networks (HAN). The proposed scheme is based on forecasting the future electricity demand for the whole BAN; thus, the BAN connects to the electricity provider only if the total demand of the cluster is changed. The proposed scheme employs the lattice-based public key NTRU cryptosystem to guarantee the confidentiality and authenticity of the exchanged messages and to further reduce the computation and communication load. The security analysis shows that our proposed scheme can achieve the privacy and security requirements. In addition, it efficiently reduces the communication and computation overhead.