PDAFT: A privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme with fault tolerance for smart grid communications

Smart grid, as the next generation of power grid featured with efficient, reliable, and flexible characteristics, has received considerable attention in recent years. However, the full flourish of smart grid is still hindered by how to efficiently and effectively tackle with its security and privacy challenges. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme with fault tolerance, named PDAFT, for secure smart grid communications. Specifically, PDAFT uses the homomorphic Paillier Encryption technique to encrypt sensitive user data such that the control center can obtain the aggregated data without knowing individual ones, and a strong adversary who aims to threaten user privacy can learn nothing even though he has already compromised a few servers at the control center. In addition, PDAFT also supports the fault-tolerant feature, i.e., PDAFT can still work well even when some user failures and server malfunctions occur. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that PDAFT not only resists various security threats and preserves user privacy, but also has significantly less communication overhead compared with those previously reported competitive approaches.