Towards a set aggregation-based data integrity scheme for smart grids

Data aggregation (DA) is the process of combining smart metering data so that it can be sent to a control center in package form rather than as individual data points. Smart metering data represents sensitive information that must be protected during the aggregation process. Traditional data aggregation schemes have addressed privacy issues based primarily on computationally expensive homomorphic encryption. In contrast, this paper presents a novel method based on hash chaining to verify the integrity of a set of aggregated data. This scheme divides the user’s data into two diverse groups. It also enables the control center to collect more fine-grained data aggregation results at a reduced cost. In addition, the proposed scheme ensures data integrity by maintaining a hash chain and assigning new values in the hash chain by XORing previous hash values with the current hash value. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of computational cost and communication overhead. A comparative analysis of our proposed methodology with existing aggregation schemes regarding computational cost and communication overhead illustrates the optimality of our proposed scheme.