PPNC: Privacy Preserving Scheme for Random Linear Network Coding in Smart Grid

In smart grid, privacy implications to individuals and their families are an important issue because of the fine-grained usage data collection. Wireless communications are utilized by many utility companies to obtain information. Network coding is exploited in smart grids, to enhance network performance in terms of throughput, delay, robustness, and energy consumption. However, random linear network coding introduces a new challenge for privacy preserving due to the encoding of data and updating of coefficients in forwarder nodes. We propose a distributed privacy preserving scheme for random linear network coding in smart grid that considers the converged flows character of the smart grid and exploits a homomorphic encryption function to decrease the complexities in the forwarder node. It offers a data confidentiality privacy preserving feature, which can efficiently thwart traffic analysis. The data of the packet is encrypted and the tag of the packet is encrypted by a homomorphic encryption function. The forwarder node random linearly codes the encrypted data and directly processes the cryptotext tags based on the homomorphism feature. Extensive security analysis and performance evaluations demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed scheme.