Privacy Preserving Data Aggregation for Smart Grid with User Anonymity and Designated Recipients

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In Internet of Things (IoT), a medium which is no more in its infancy, the vulnerabilities and attacks are various, caused by technological advances and proliferated through lack of users’ awareness. Certain features of interconnected things, such as ubiquity, miniaturization, difficult identification, ultra-connectivity, and autonomous and unpredictable behaviour, might cause serious ethical and security concerns. On this background, the subject of the paper, privacy protection in smart grids, is more than welcomed, being characterized by great actuality and importance. The article presents a scheme for a more secure and flexible solution for privacy preserving data aggregation in smart grid.

The introduction is focused on the need to assure the most important security features (confidentiality, authentication, user anonymity and no single point of trust) during the design and implementation of a smart grid. In the literature review, the authors present related papers useful for the rest of the paper. This part can be improved by mentioning similar solutions to the same problem (assuring the privacy in smart grid/other IoT implementations) from the literature. The proposed scheme for data aggregation is clearly explained. The paper covers the intentions expressed by the authors in the abstract, is interesting and aligned to the current trends in cybersecurity.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

1. The abstract should be concise and compact. 
2. Introduction: There is very little mention of previous work. Please explain in brief.
   
   
3. Author should highlight how the work advances or increments the field from the present state of knowledge and provide a clear justification for your work.
   
   
4. The authors should clearly describe related work in more detail, contrasting the limitations of the related works.
5. Authors should explain how user anonymity is controlled by the proposed algorithm. 
6. Authors should proofread for sentence formation and other grammatical errors.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The paper overall all is good, however, the authors should pay attention:

• The authors should make sure that all citations and references are in the correct sequence.
• Explain the nature and family of hash and encryption functions that has been considered in the proposed scheme?
• To understand the network model, the authors need to provide details about the types of communication links between Users, RMMi and PTUs devices.
• Authors should thoroughly check all the symbols used in the proposed scheme.
• The conclusion part should provide future directions, which will assist other scholars in conducting study in this field.
• The abstract should be shortened. It is too long.
• Finally, authors need to extensively proofread the article with the use of English.

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

Different privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes that satisfy user privacy and data authentication requirements have been proposed in the literature. Although as the authors of the paper rightly comment, in real-world applications some additional requirements are desirable. In this paper, a privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme for smart grids with user anonymity and designated recipients is proposed. 

As is known, smart meters are responsible for collecting energy consumption data from users, encrypt it using a homomorphic re-encryption scheme, and then send the ciphertexts anonymously. Verification techniques are used to ensure that only data from legitimate users is accepted and to prevent tampering. Proxies are also used to encrypt the aggregated data in a distributed manner so that only designated recipients can decrypt it. 

The authors present their proposed scheme for privacy-preserving data aggregation in the smart grid. Security analyses are provided that validate that the scheme meets all the security and efficiency requirements put forward. 

The paper is well structured and provides one more grain in the field of secure data collection for smart meters. Although the related papers section needs more work, papers such as "Analysis of cybersecurity threats in Industry 4.0: the case of intrusion detection" and "A Resilient Architecture for the Smart Grid" are missing. Finally, I think it would be interesting to consider this useful solution as a security pattern as presented in "Development of Applications Based on Security Patterns" and "Representation of Security and Dependability Solutions". The work is interesting and represents a significant advance in the state of the art.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx