EPEC: an efficient privacy-preserving energy consumption scheme for smart grid communications

In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving energy consumption scheme with updating certificates, called EPEC, for secure smart grid communications. Specifically, the proposed EPEC scheme consists of four phases: gateways initialization, party registration, privacy-preserving energy consumption, and updating certificates. Based on the bilinear pairing, the identity-based encryption, and the strategy of updating certificates, EPEC can achieve data privacy, gateway privacy, and is robust to data replay attack, availability attack, modification attack, man-in-the-middle attack, and Sybil attack. Through extensive performance evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EPEC in terms of transmission delay performance at the HAN gateway and average delivery ratio, by implementing three types of curves including, the Barreto–Naehrig curve with modulus 256 bits, the Kachisa–Schaefer–Scott curve with modulus 512 bits, and the Barreto–Lynn–Scott curve with modulus 640 bits.