A Hybrid Cryptography Scheme for NILM Data Security

• Main Authors: Ruijue Feng, Zhidong Wang, Zhifeng Li, Haixia Ma, Ruiyuan Chen, Zhengbin Pu, Ziqiu Chen, Xianyu Zeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: Electronics
• Subjects: NILM; privacy; cryptography; hybrid cipher algorithm
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/7/1128

Using fine-grained data analysis, non-invasive load monitoring (NILM) can reveal the detail of electricity customers’ habits, which is helpful in the improvement of refined management and better user experience. However, the possibility of electricity customers’ privacy leak is also gradually increasing, and the security of NILM data has become a priority problem to be solved. To protect the privacy disclosure of NILM data, this paper analyzes the NILM privacy leak problems and ways in which information leak occurs faced by NILM data. On the basis of the comprehensive survey of cryptographic algorithms to choose the most appropriate data security method for NILM, a hybrid cryptography scheme was proposed to protect the data security. In the scheme, symmetric algorithm AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) was used to encrypt data for high efficiency, and asymmetric algorithm RSA (<i>Rivest-Shamir-Adleman)</i> was used to encrypt AES key for identity authentication. The classical algorithm HMAC-SHA1 (Hash Message Authentication Codes-Secure Hash Algorithm 1) was further developed to guarantee the integrity of data. By transplanting the algorithm into STM32 MCU (STMicroelectronics 32 bit Micro Controller Unit) for performance test and using Visual studio 2017 + QT tools to develop the test interface, one optimal operation mode was selected for the scheme. At the same time, the effectiveness of the scheme was verified, and the scheme computing cost depended on the efficiency of encryption and decryption, or signature and verification of the RSA algorithm.