Efficient design and extensive hardware evaluation of an anonymous data aggregation scheme for smart grid

In smart grid, consumption reports are sent to the energy supplier at regular intervals through some data collectors. This high‐frequent usage reports' collection may divulge the privacy of smart grid users. Recently, Badra and Zeadally have proposed an interesting virtual ring architecture that is used to collect the smart meters' requests while keeping the privacy of smart grid users. However, their proposed scheme suffers from the false data pollution attack. Several other data collection schemes have been proposed in the last decade. Nevertheless, most of them only have considered the external attackers, some of them rely on a third‐trusted party, some are not anonymous, and none of them has examined suitable hardware to be employed by each entity in smart grid. Thus, in this paper, we propose a lightweight and anonymous data collection scheme that can both provide the required privacy of consumers and resist the attacks performed by both external and internal adversaries. More importantly, we have implemented the cryptographic elements on three state‐of‐the‐art hardware. Detailed comparative performance analysis demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of both communication and computational costs. We hope that the achieved results be useful for other future researches in this field.