Demand response management using lattice-based cryptography in smart grids

Abstract

The prolonged usage of non-renewable resources like petroleum and coal have adverse affect on the environment and has led to energy crisis in the world. In order to mitigate the situation, efficient strategies have been proposed for generation, distribution and consumption of energy obtained from renewable sources such as tidal, wind and solar power. With the advent of Smart Grids being developed world wide, the most widely accepted strategy is Demand-Response management. In this strategy, the customers or end-users are incentivized to change their energy-utility behavior with time in response to fluid price changes or to induce lower energy consumption during peak demand time. The system is controlled by a cloud of servers that monitor the demand- supply chain over a network all the time. This brings up the issue of security within the operations of the system. Current security mechanisms such as Rivest-Shamir-Alderman (RSA) public key encryption, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric encryption, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) public-key cryptosytem and the recently proposed works are not future- proof in the world of post-quantum cryptography. This paper proposes a lattice based cryptographic scheme to ensure proper security in the system. The proposed scheme has been proven secure against major known attacks.