Privacy-Preserving Outsourcing Algorithms for Multidimensional Data Encryption in Smart Grids

With the development of the Internet of Things, smart grids have become indispensable in our daily life and can provide people with reliable electricity generation, transmission, distribution and control. Therefore, how to design a privacy-preserving data aggregation protocol has been a research hot-spot in smart grid technology. However, these proposed protocols often contain some complex cryptographic operations, which are not suitable for resource-constrained smart meter devices. In this paper, we combine data aggregation and the outsourcing of computations to design two privacy-preserving outsourcing algorithms for the modular exponentiation operations involved in the multi-dimensional data aggregation, which can allow these smart meter devices to delegate complex computation tasks to nearby servers for computing. By utilizing our proposed outsourcing algorithms, the computational overhead of resource-constrained smart meter devices can be greatly reduced in the process of data encryption and aggregation. In addition, the proposed algorithms can protect the input’s privacy of smart meter devices and ensure that the smart meter devices can verify the correctness of results from the server with a very small computational cost. From three aspects, including security, verifiability and efficiency, we give a detailed analysis about our proposed algorithms. Finally, through carrying out some experiments, we prove that our algorithms can improve the efficiency of performing the data encryption and aggregation on the smart meter device side.