Secure and efficient sharing of authenticated energy usage data with privacy preservation

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd As a technological innovation, smart grid improves electricity services in terms of substantiality, economics, efficiency, and reliability. This owes to the bi-directional communication property which not only enables the fine-grained energy usage data to be available for different entities but also facilitates the automated grid management. However, sharing such energy usage data with other parties could potentially cause the leakage of customers’ sensitive information. In addition, the data are vulnerable to be tampered with by any internal or external attacker such that the value of data could be destroyed. Therefore, it is crucial to preserve customers’ privacy and provide authenticity and verifiability while sharing energy usage data with other parties. In this paper, we propose a bilinear-map accumulator based redactable signature scheme (RSS-BMA) which allows customers to safeguard their privacy while guaranteeing the verifiability of shared data. Furthermore, the batch-data-block verification property of our design enhances not only efficiency but also security by prohibiting additional redaction to a batch of data blocks. We analyze the efficiency and security of our proposed scheme extensively, and the results indicate our construction is more practical than others.