A secure encrypted transmission method for electric power metering data based on the DES-RSA hybrid algorithm

Abstract Current electricity metering data relies on heterogeneous wired and wireless networks for high-frequency transmission and is exposed to threats such as eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, and data integrity violations. Traditional encryption methods face a trade-off between efficiency and security, where DES offers fast symmetric encryption but weak key strength, while RSA provides strong security but high computational cost. To address this, a DES–RSA hybrid encryption mechanism is proposed for secure power metering data transmission. A hyperplane-based classifier is used for sensitive data identification to enable selective encryption of privacy-critical information using DES, while RSA ensures secure key exchange and digital signatures. A hash-learning model is introduced for trusted transmission path selection based on network topology and node features. Experimental results with 153,600 daily data entries and 15 min transmission intervals show real-time encryption/decryption throughput of 5–7 MB/s, transmission security above 97.5 %, and error bit rate below 10 %. The experiments are conducted on an Intel Xeon E5-class processor with 64 GB RAM using a Python-based implementation, and AES mode equivalent comparisons are evaluated under standard ECB/CBC-like block processing assumptions for fairness. The proposed method ensures secure, efficient, and scalable transmission for smart grid environments.