AggFT: Low-Cost Fault-Tolerant Smart Meter Aggregation with Proven Termination and Privacy
This work addresses privacy and reliability issues in smart grid systems for customers and utility providers, but it is incremental as it builds upon an existing protocol.
The paper tackles the problem of smart meter data aggregation protocols failing under smart meter or network communication failures by proposing a lightweight, fault-tolerant algorithm that reduces computational costs, simplifies fault handling, and provides formal proofs of termination and privacy.
Smart meter data aggregation protocols have been developed to address rising privacy threats against customers' consumption data. However, these protocols do not work satisfactorily in the presence of failures of smart meters or network communication links. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and fault-tolerant aggregation algorithm that can serve as a solid foundation for further research. We revisit an existing error-resilient privacy-preserving aggregation protocol based on masking and improve it by: (i) performing changes in the cryptographic parts that lead to a reduction of computational costs, (ii) simplifying the behaviour of the protocol in the presence of faults, and showing a proof of proper termination under a well-defined failure model, (iii) decoupling the computation part from the data flow so that the algorithm can also be used with homomorphic encryption as a basis for privacy-preservation. To best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that is formulated for both, masking and homomorphic encryption. (iv) Finally, we provide a formal proof of the privacy guarantee under failure. The systematic treatment with strict proofs and the established connection to graph theory may also serve as a starting point for possible generalizations and improvements with respect to increased resilience.