Investigating Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Securing Smart Grid Environments

Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance of an elliptic curve based approach for the task of data aggregation in smart grids. This scheme supports a distributed data aggregation approach, where smart meters at each level of the tree aggregate results from their children and transmit it to their parents. We use homomorphic encryption to ensure the privacy of encrypted power usage data during its transmission among the smart meters. Power usage statistics are aggregated at each level of the network tree, and a smart meter shall not gain any information on the encrypted data received by it. We discuss some advantages of using elliptic curves to ensure additive homomorphism, and justify some of its shortcomings and performance issues. We also consider possible improvements that allows the proposed system to perform well in the environment of smart grid system. Finally, we compare the proposed scheme to the Paillier cryptosystem using the Mosaik smart grid simulation framework.