A privacy-preserving and real-time traceable power request scheme for smart grid

Smart grid facilitates reliable and efficient power generation and transmission by integrating information and communication technologies. By collecting users' power demands in advance, the control center (power operator) can adjust the amount of electricity generated to reduce the excess power, which can increase the profit of the power operator. However, on the one hand, user's privacy becomes a critical issue, since it may leak out a user's life habits, which may make user's safety and belongings under threat. On the other hand, the system needs to arm the capability to avoid diverse adversaries' attacks and trace misbehaving users (who request power irresponsibly). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving and real-time traceable power request scheme to fulfill the security requirements. We utilize aggregator as a proxy between users and the control center, which verifies the messages and aggregates multiple users' requests together to preserve their privacy. More importantly, this privacy-preserving mechanism has no effect for the control center to whether charge each user, or trace the misbehaving users in real time. The performance analysis shows that our scheme is efficient in terms of computation and storage overhead.