A Lightweight and Privacy-Friendly Data Aggregation Scheme against Abnormal Data

Abnormal electricity data, caused by electricity theft or meter failure, leads to the inaccuracy of aggregation results. These inaccurate results not only harm the interests of users but also affect the decision-making of the power system. However, the existing data aggregation schemes do not consider the impact of abnormal data. How to filter out abnormal data is a challenge. To solve this problem, in this study, we propose a lightweight and privacy-friendly data aggregation scheme against abnormal data, in which the valid data can correctly be aggregated but abnormal data will be filtered out during the aggregation process. This is more suitable for resource-limited smart meters, due to the adoption of lightweight matrix encryption. The automatic filtering of abnormal data without additional processes and the detection of abnormal data sources are where our protocol outperforms other schemes. Finally, a detailed security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can protect the privacy of users’ data. In addition, the results of extensive simulations demonstrate that the additional computation cost to filter the abnormal data is within the acceptable range, which shows that our proposed scheme is still very effective.