IoT-Enabled Fog-Based Secure Aggregation in Smart Grids Supporting Data Analytics

The Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed multiple industries, providing significant potential for automation, efficiency, and enhanced decision-making. The incorporation of IoT and data analytics in smart grid represents a groundbreaking opportunity for the energy sector, delivering substantial advantages in efficiency, sustainability, and customer empowerment. This integration enables smart grids to autonomously monitor energy flows and adjust to fluctuations in energy demand and supply in a flexible and real-time fashion. Statistical analytics, as a fundamental component of data analytics, provides the necessary tools and techniques to uncover patterns, trends, and insights within datasets. Nevertheless, it is crucial to address privacy and security issues to fully maximize the potential of data analytics in smart grids. This paper makes several significant contributions to the literature on secure, privacy-aware aggregation schemes in smart grids. First, we introduce a Fog-enabled Secure Data Analytics Operations (FESDAO) scheme which offers a distributed architecture incorporating robust security features such as secure aggregation, authentication, fault tolerance and resilience against insider threats. The scheme achieves privacy during data aggregation through a modified Boneh-Goh-Nissim cryptographic scheme along with other mechanisms. Second, FESDAO also supports statistical analytics on metering data at the cloud control center and fog node levels. FESDAO ensures reliable aggregation and accurate data analytical results, even in scenarios where smart meters fail to report data, thereby preserving both analytical operation computation accuracy and latency. We further provide comprehensive security analyses to demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively supports data privacy, source authentication, fault tolerance, and resilience against false data injection and replay attacks. Lastly, we offer thorough performance evaluations to illustrate the efficiency of the suggested scheme in comparison to current state-of-the-art schemes, considering encryption, computation, aggregation, decryption, and communication costs. Moreover, a detailed security analysis has been conducted to verify the scheme’s resistance against insider collusion attacks, replay attack, and false data injection (FDI) attack.