LFTDA: A lightweight and fault-tolerant data aggregation scheme with privacy-enhanced property in fog-assisted smart grid

In recent years, the data aggregation scheme was widely adopted in smart grids (SG) to protect data privacy while ensuring data availability. Meanwhile, asymmetric homomorphic encryption is a popular technique that guarantees data aggregation and accurate computing results. However, it often brings heavy computation overheads and costs, which increases burdens to SG. In order to lighten SG’s burden, in this paper, a lightweight and fault-tolerant data aggregation scheme (LFTDA) with privacy-enhanced property is proposed. Unlike existing schemes, our proposed scheme uses a lightweight symmetric encryption algorithm and a skillful mathematical structure to achieve data aggregation. In addition, in the proposed scheme, smart meters are allowed to dynamically join and exit from the group while guaranteeing the correctness, security, and efficiency of aggregation. More importantly, our LFTDA is fault-tolerant, which means that the data collection from other devices will not be affected even if some of the smart meters or fog nodes do not work. From the view of security, LFTDA can defend against eavesdropping attack and collusion attack. Finally, we evaluate its performance along with other related schemes in terms of aggregation, decryption, and communication costs, which shows that LFTDA is very competitive and hence is suitable for many practical SG applications.