An anonymous and identity-trackable data transmission scheme for smart grid under smart city notion.

In addition to changing service management, smart devices connect people and objects around them and collect data from them on and on, in order to construct the notion of a smart city. Such data produced by embedded devices and automatically transmitted over the Internet provides people with the information to make decisions. A smart grid is one of the most popular applications for a smart city. Due to the insecurity of the wireless channels, the security of data transmission in a smart grid has become a hot issue nowadays. Many schemes for data protection have been proposed, but weaknesses exist generally. We present a new data transmission scheme for a smart grid among the smart meter (SM), the electricity utility (EU), and the trusted authority (TA). The EU can obtain the power consumption of each SM, but cannot get the real identity of the SM. To keep the privacy of the user, if the consumption value is over the threshold in special time span or identity of SM is required for public affairs, TA could track the identity in time. Formal proof with random oracle model and security analysis are expressed to show the security of the proposed scheme. Via the performance and network simulation, it is easy to see that our scheme is practical for a smart city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]